News/Canada

TORONTO - The Knights of Columbus in the tornado-ravaged town of Goderich, Ont., are front and centre in the efforts to help the town recover from a devastating tornado that hit Aug. 21.

"(Our hall is) the evacuation centre," Steve Winter, Grand Knight of the Father Nagle Council 5420, told The Catholic Register. "We have a hall that will hold 600 people for banquets."

When the tornado tore through the town, "we were the spot in town that had electricity because we're hooked up to the town's generator," said Winter.

Because the Knights of Columbus hall is the central location for those in need, the Canadian Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Victims Services and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are set up in the hall, too.

OTTAWA - Due to recent episcopal nominations as well as the death of Timmins Bishop Paul Marchand, a number of dioceses will see some changes in the near future.

Fr. Patrick Lafleur has been elected administrator of the diocese of Timmins after the death of Marchand, S.S.M., On July 24.

There was never a time Dr. David McCann didn’t believe and never a time he didn’t know what he believed. Until he died Aug. 8 after a short battle with pancreatic cancer, the McMaster University associate professor of family medicine and expert in disaster relief operations only believed more and more — in God, his Church, his family and the inviolable sacredness of life.

The 50-year-old doctor leaves his wife Donna and five children.

He also leaves a sort of second family in the Florida One Disaster Medical Assistance Team. McCann was its chief medical officer despite having moved away from Georgia to Hamilton, Ont., in 2007.

A dual citizen, Dr. McCann had joined the emergency response team not long after working with survivors of the 9/11 terror attacks. He responded annually to hurricanes in the United States and to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

OTTAWA - Jack Layton was not religious but the former NDP leader is being remembered as a deeply spiritual man whose commitment to a caring society had a Christian foundation.

TORONTO - Toronto hosted 620 delegates of the Catholic Women’s League from Aug. 14 to 17 as they gathered for the 91st annual CWL National Convention, themed “Centred on Faith & Justice.”

The four-day conference, held at the Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre Hotel, presented four new resolutions that will be initiatives of the League in the coming year. The resolutions include prohibiting practices involving the destruction or manipulation of human embryos, providing support for children of missing and murdered aboriginal women, creating a national organ and tissue donation and transplantation registry, and mandating caffeine warning labels on energy drinks.

The resolutions were chosen from a group of more than a dozen proposals that had risen through the diocesan and provincial councils to the national level from parishes across the country.

OTTAWA - A new web site for the Canadian edition of the Roman Missal will help Catholics across Canada to understand the contents of the new book.

The web site can be found at www.romanmissal.ca.

Available this fall, the web site includes resources for preparing parish bulletins and workshops. It also has links to Roman Missal-related materials from the National Liturgy Office and the Publications Service of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, who will be producing the missal.

Also, parishioners can access the web sites of Catholic dioceses across Canada concerning the Roman Missal as well as links from the Vatican and English-speaking conferences of bishops around the world.

Archbishop emeritus Austin-Emile Burke passed up a promising career pursuing the Canadian dream in the National Hockey League to take a shot at another goal: to become a priest.

Archbishop Burke died peacefully on Aug. 12 at Evans Hall, Parkstone Enhanced Care. He was 89.

In his 61 years of priesthood, including 23 years as bishop of Yarmouth, where he was born, Archbishop Burke far exceeded his goals, says Halifax Archbishop Anthony Mancini.

Archbishop Burke's pastoral approach endeared him to parishioners during his years in Yarmouth, Mancini said.

“He was one of their own, very much appreciated by the people there,” said Mancini. “He was like a native son,” referring not only to Archbishop Burke's pastoral ministry but also his Acadian heritage.

About 200 Jesuits and their lay collaborators gathered at Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ont., from July 27 to 31 to “remember and renew without counting the cost.”

The congress for the Jesuits in English Canada celebrated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jesuits to Canada on May 22, 1611.

“We decided that we would use this celebration not only to remember this foundational event but also to gather all the Jesuits from English Canada plus those who work with us in significant roles in our ministries across the country,” said Fr. Erik Oland, a member of the organizing committee which began meeting about two years ago to plan the congress.

In addition, a substantial delegation of French Canadian Jesuits and one member of the Hungarian Jesuits in Canada were in attendance.

OTTAWA - Conservative MP Joy Smith plans to introduce five pieces of legislation to combat human trafficking, including a change in prostitution laws to punish men who buy sex, particularly from underage women.

“What I want to do is target the market,” she said.

Though the details of her legislation are embargoed, Smith said she likes the Nordic model that treats the women and children involved in prostitution as victims and criminalizes the men who buy sex or make money off exploiting prostitutes. Penalties could include fines and/or jail time.

The Nordic model was adopted after hard evidence showed the harms that developed in some countries that had tried legalizing prostitution, she said. Legalized prostitution leads to an increase in violence against women, increase in child rape and child pornography, and a rise in human trafficking, she said.

OTTAWA - At Bishop Raymond Lahey’s sentencing hearing here Aug. 4, his lawyers tried to show his child porn collection was smaller, less sophisticated and less hard-core than others examined by an Ottawa Police detective.

Detective Andrew Thompson, who found 588 child porn images, 60 videos and a file containing fictional stories on the bishop’s laptop and other devices, agreed Lahey’s collection was smaller than some he had investigated which had included hundreds of thousands of illegal images. And while Thompson agreed many of Lahey’s images were on the soft-core end of the spectrum, showing adolescent boys in nude poses, he stressed some were “quite graphic” and included “torture and stuff like that.”

The expert in child pornography investigations and computer forensics admitted he has seen worse child pornography than those in Lahey’s collection, but some of the bishop’s worst images “were right up there.” None of the material depicted infants, for example, but “the explicit images of torture are disturbing,” he said.

He told the court that the unusual combination of images, videos and stories showed that “Mr. Lahey has gone out and searched for stuff like that.”