When Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us” in a comic strip back in 1970, he didn’t know the half of it. Pogo never heard of Twitter, attack ads, bot farms or “doing your own research.” Pogo could never have imagined a Church or society broken down into political and cultural sects caught up in perpetual rhetorical war with one another.

Published in Canada

Since my teenage years, I have wondered what a better world would look like. What sort of society should we hope for? I also wonder if our world did become better, would we even know that to be the case. That is, what criteria would enable us to determine when the state of the world had improved?

Published in Register Columnists

This is an article about Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and how she recently burst into my world bringing hope on a sad day. But in order to bring you to the light, I have to start in the darkness. It was Oct. 7, 2022 when the bureaucratic voice of a Canadian doctor testifying before a federal committee about medical aid in dying called for its expansion to include infanticide. Dr. Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians proposed extending assisted suicide to babies before age one. 

Published in Guest Columns
October 14, 2022

Division by ‘ism’

As a child, I was fishing off a wooden dock at the small lake near the town in B.C. where I grew up when a farmer from Saskatchewan and his son appeared  as if out of a dream I didn’t know I was having.

Published in Register Columnists

The overriding “reform” of the Second Vatican Council was a renewed call to mission to the world. The reform of the liturgy, the expanded sense of Church as the pilgrim people of God, the openness to ecumenism and the paring back of Catholic triumphalism are all to be of service to that central idea.

Published in Register Columnists

The aspect of the proposed Alberta sovereignty act which most gives me pause is not the legal chaos into which it will throw this province if enacted — although that is worrisome enough — but the spirit of division which it seeks to codify in law.

Published in Register Columnists

Canadians are getting in on a 30-year-old Vatican project to recast our thinking, our politics and our way of life. On a Sept. 17 Zoom call, a small group will launch the Canadian chapter of Centesimus Annus-Pro Pontifice, a lay-led organization created by St. Pope John Paul II in the Vatican.

Published in Canada

Ontarians went to the polls just over three weeks ago., with the Progressive Conservatives elected with a mass majority, but this election featured record-low voter turnout, with less than half of eligible voters showing up to the polls.

Published in YSN: Speaking Out

Elsewhere in this issue of The Catholic Register, former Ontario MPP John Milloy makes an eloquent case for why and how Catholics should sustain involvement in political life.

Published in Editorial

Catholic bishops urged Australians to consider the nation’s most vulnerable people when voting in federal elections May 21.

Published in International

Some will sniff that a hierarchical Church is hardly an institution to concern itself with authoritarian politics.

Published in Peter Stockland

Grace Rogalski utilized her power as a young Canadian Catholic voter for the first time in last month’s federal election

Published in Youth Speak News

Unfurling Bernadette Devlin, Quebec’s Catholic bishops, Irish nuns and William F. Buckley Jr. in the same thought, never mind one sentence, might be considered psychologically, even rhetorically, impossible. Well, there it is. Impossibility vanquished. 

Published in Peter Stockland

“We look forward to hearing what you have to enrich the discussion,” said one student to an opponent at the second annual Ethics Bowl Feb. 27 in discussing whether or not pardoning criminals gave justice to the victims. “I’m excited to hear what team B has to say,” said another young competitor with a smile.

Published in Canada

A friend contacted me a few days ago incensed by Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole banishing Ontario MP Derek Sloan from the party in mid-January.

Published in Peter Stockland