Seeking common ground in a polarized world
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.
Follow the path of self-sacrificing love
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?
Italian PM puts culture of death in the shade
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.
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.
The Holy Spirit isn’t your political backstop
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.
Canada needs political prophets of unity, virtue
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.
Putting a CAPP on rising polarization
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.
Get engaged politically
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.
Editorial: Conscience matters
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.
Catholic bishops urged Australians to consider the nation’s most vulnerable people when voting in federal elections May 21.
Peter Stockland: Love will always prove necessary
Some will sniff that a hierarchical Church is hardly an institution to concern itself with authoritarian politics.
Youth encouraged to be politically engaged
Grace Rogalski utilized her power as a young Canadian Catholic voter for the first time in last month’s federal election
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.
Ethics Bowl shows what is missing in political discourse
“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.
Peter Stockland: Let’s not put our trust in princes
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.