Sixty per cent of Canadian children are being raised in homes with married parents, a new study has found, a number that has stayed steady since 2016 after years of decline.

Receiving the gift is the last stage of Advent becoming Christmas. Jesus arrives and we receive the One we have awaited. The seasons and feast days of church calendars exist not only to change the colours and routines of faith life, but also change the way we live our whole lives. We learn to practice waiting — in joyful hope — for Jesus to arrive. And this practice waiting and receiving is meant to help us get better at waiting and receiving in the rest of our lives too.

When my husband recently went on a work trip for four days, our daughter started to act out more at the same time. Or perhaps she was just being her regular three-year-old self and I noticed it more. I called a friend through tears.

Mainstream outlets and social media players had kittens last week over remarks attributed to Pope Francis about the “selfishness” of people keeping pets in place of raising children.

As the story goes … a doctor asked a patient if anyone in his family suffered from insanity. “No,” he replied. “We all seem to enjoy it.”

Imperfection and I have had a rocky relationship. For years, I pretended she didn’t even exist. When she showed up unexpectedly, I dressed her up in different clothes and tried to pass her off as someone else. I recognized, eventually, that she was actually a roommate I despised. And in more recent years, I’ve been trying to be reconciled to my sister. Imperfection has gifts I need, and she has been much more gracious with me than I deserve.

Mess is not a new way of living for our family, but moving has a way of making figurative messes real. Our house is full of boxes, waiting for certainty that we will not need to move again soon.

OTTAWA -- A new organization focused on supporting families within the Catholic Church in Canada is now up and running.

“I am enough” is a mantra I’ve carried close to my heart these last few years. Brené Brown taught me about being enough with her meditations on the Gifts of Imperfection. Parenthood forced me to acknowledge both what I cannot do and how to show up imperfectly for my kids. And I have been teetering for the last several weeks on an edge of enough I had not seen before.

In his own way, Pope Francis is developing a different kind of vaccine to battle the effects of COVID-19. This is not a vaccine developed in a scientific lab, but it may well be a much-needed antidote to some of the unseen but crippling injuries that have accompanied the pandemic.

The “nuclear family.” Such a strange phrase. Does it glow? What exactly is it?

Catholic parents seeking to help their children make sense of world events have had their work cut out for them in 2020.

When Margaret and Paul O’Connor first met in 1946, they were teenagers enjoying a Catholic youth night at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. As they swayed to the sounds of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, little did they know that one day they would celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary.

The thought of 14 children would be inconceivable for most couples these days but for Carissa and Patrick Douglas it’s a dream come true.

On Sept. 5, 1920, Laura Cardoso left the family home in which she had been born to marry Salustiano Roque de Freitas. Nearly 100 years later, I visited that home, now deserted, in her village in Goa, India.