Bishop Jon Hansen spoke to an “essentially full” St. Patrick’s Co-Cathedral on Sept. 10, in front of Yellowknife Catholics eager to congregate after nearly a month of being deprived of their home and parish community due to the rampant wildfires.

Art program helps displaced northerners take their minds off wildfires.

People jumping into a lake to escape being consumed by flames. Roadways jammed with vehicles on the move. Kilometre-long line-ups to airstrips offering evacuation flights.

Wildfires wreaking devastation across British Columbia and the Northwest Territories have apparently spared Catholic churches, though numerous other buildings cannot say the same thing.

Catholic churches have thus far been spared from the more than 200 wildfires sweeping through the Northwest Territories, according to Bishop Jon Hansen of the Mackenzie-Fort Smith diocese.

"For us, it's like a miracle," Msgr. Terrence Watanabe, the Honolulu Diocese's vicar of Maui and Lanai, said about Maria Lanakila Catholic Church in the town of Lahaina being seemingly untouched by the fierce Maui wildfires Aug. 8-9.

Catholic Charities Hawai'i in the Honolulu Diocese has appealed for donations to help the agency meet housing, food and other needs of what could be thousands of victims from wildfires raging on the island of Maui that wiped out an entire town and drove people to seek refuge in the ocean.

As Nova Scotians received a welcome dose of good news on June 5 that the overall wildfire situation across the province has been contained and many of the evacuees were authorized to return to their homes, the Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth continued to call for prayer for those affected.

Heavy rainfall throughout the province of Alberta over the May long weekend potentially signaled a hopeful turning point in the effort to quell the 2023 wildfire state of emergency.

So far Catholic parishes in the path of devastating wildfires that have swept across Alberta have only been evacuated as a precaution, with no parishes reporting any damage by mid-month.

KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Father Prakash Rao Kola was in Coldwater, Kansas, 30 miles east of Ashland, the afternoon of March 6 when he began to get frantic calls from parishioners.

PIGEON FORGE, Tenn. – St. Mary's Catholic Church was at ground zero in the wildfires that devastated parts of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge Nov. 28, and while flames reached to within yards of the tourist city church, it appears to have been spared.

JERUSALEM – Catholic leaders in the Holy Land expressed solidarity with those affected by regional wildfires, which continued to burn after five days.

In recent decades Fort McMurray and the oil industry it symbolizes has divided Canadians. The Alberta oil hub was regarded as either a badge of national prosperity or symbol of ecological disgrace. The arguments were fierce.