A week before celebrating the Resurrection, we had the resurrection of Resurrection.

The Archdiocese of Montreal and four smaller dioceses within its ecclesiastical province have enlisted a former judge to conduct an external audit of files on the sexual abuse of minors dating back to 1950.

A crucifix that has hung on the wall of Montreal’s City Hall since 1937, reminding city officials to let God guide their decisions, will be taken down for a renovation project, never to be put back.

Five Montreal-area dioceses have hired a retired judge to examine seven decades of archival files to shed light on credible reports of sexual abuse by clergy that have been kept silent.

OTTAWA - It would be inappropriate for a person intent on assisted suicide to request the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, said Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast.

MONTREAL - Calling her a star in a “constellation of holiness,” Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine has opened the cause for sainthood of a 17th-century Montreal laywoman.

MONTREAL - Montreal Archbishop Christian Lepine celebrated Mass on a birch bark canoe altar June 24 to mark the feast of St. John the Baptist while at the same time commemorating the 400th anniversary of what is widely thought to be the first Mass ever celebrated on the Island of Montreal.

Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Montreal's Saint Nom-de-Jesus church was closed due to a fire. There was, in fact, no fire but the church was closed at the insistence of fire inspectors.

MONTREAL - Five years after it was closed, more than a thousand parishioners and visiting dignitaries filled Montreal’s historic Saint Nom-de Jésus on Christmas Eve to celebrate the reopening of their church.

ROME - The historic “Sunday of four popes” attracted more than 800,000 pilgrims — the largest turnout ever for a canonization Mass — including seven Canadian bishops.

OTTAWA - Archbishop Christian Lépine’s installation April 27 as archbishop of Montreal inaugurates a new era for the Quebec episcopacy, said a McGill University historian.

“Now there’s a new generation of bishops who are very much in tune with the needs of young people in their dioceses, and this is crucial for the new evangelization,” said John Zucchi.

A generation of bishops who were in their 70s, “many of them concerned with a 1970s and ’80s way of looking at the Church,” have retired, replaced in recent years by a new age cohort that has “rejuvenated” the episcopacy and brought fresh perspective, Zucchi said.

How do you reform an episcopate and provide new leadership for the Church in a particular nation? Canada is now the model for the Church universal on how it can be done.

The dramatic appointment of Christian Lépine as the new archbishop of Montreal, only six months after he was ordained an auxiliary bishop of the same diocese, has drawn attention to Canada as the exemplar of how an episcopate can be reconfigured for the challenges of the new evangelization.

Just 18 months ago, in the fall of 2010, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, former archbishop of Quebec City, arrived in Rome as the new prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. The prefect is the most senior advisor to the Holy Father on the appointment of bishops. High on the new prefect’s agenda was the renewal of the bishops of Quebec, with a number of retirements pending.