VATICAN – Pope Francis attended the funeral Mass and presided over the final commendation of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the French cardinal who led the Vatican's outreach to other religions and who had announced to the world his election as pope five years ago.

Death has lived in the shadows and been discussed in whispers for a very long time.

Gone prematurely, remembered always.

Rebecca Maureen (Becky) Beaton passed away early one mid-May morning after a gutsy 30-month battle with cancer. Becky was just 36 and I was proud to call her my niece for that seemingly brief period of time.

VATICAN CITY – Heaven is not an eternally dull existence but rather the completion of a journey toward a promised encounter with the Lord, Pope Francis said.

MANCHESTER, England – Celebrating the funeral of a disgraced Scottish cardinal, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales invoked the mercy of God and asked for prayers of healing.

This past fall, my mother received a call from the care home in Yorkton, Sask., where her eldest sister was a resident. My mother was informed that her sister had taken a turn in health and there likely wasn’t much time left. 

Jesuit Fr. Bill Ryan was never going to settle for a small, quiet, unobtrusive, private faith. For the Harvard-educated economist any notion that God was real, that God intends justice, must be met with real, concrete and public action.

MONTREAL - Fr. Gerald Pocock, who died Sept. 4 in Ottawa at age 92, was a gregarious Roman Catholic chaplain at Montreal’s St. Mary’s Hospital in 1969 when he befriended American jazz legend Duke Ellington.

OTTAWA – A Catholic woman has filed a complaint with a Quebec health agency alleging that her husband was denied antibiotics to treat a bladder infection after doctors determined it was better to let him die because he had cancer.

Pope Francis offered his condolences and his prayers to the people of Sierra Leone after flooding and a major mudslide Aug. 14 led to the deaths of hundreds of people and displaced thousands.

Nick Volk was a fighter who chose sides in the battlefield of Toronto’s pricey real estate market. The Harvard-educated gentleman who began his career in the American foreign service chose the side of the poor.

Just a year after his extraordinary ordination and while celebrating a friend’s ordination in British Columbia, Fr. Trevor Plug has died.

YAOUNDE, Cameroon – Catholic bishops in Cameroon said a bishop whose body was pulled from a river in early June did not commit suicide, but was murdered.

“I go on ahead to prepare a place for you!” Jesus speaks those words to His disciples on the eve of His death as He sits at table with them and senses their sadness as they grapple with His dying, His going away.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser will be a leader at the 2017 National Catholic Mission, addressing the theme “Our final gift,” based on Fr. Henri Nouwen’s thesis that death can be our final gift to others. Fr. Rolheiser addressed that concept in a 2001 column reprinted here with his blessing.