Catholic Register Staff

Catholic Register Staff

March 28, 2008

Latimer's challenge

{mosimage}Robert Latimer’s highly publicized campaign to obtain a reversal of his second-degree murder conviction should force Canadians to think twice about our seemingly unstoppable “progress” toward legalized euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide.

March 25, 2008

Focus on China

{mosimage}The showdown in Tibet between Chinese troops and Tibetans demonstrating to protest Beijing’s oppressive rule have achieved the kind of global prominence in the media that religiously minded Chinese can only dream about. It’s the usual sad fare: dozens of deaths and violent repression of riots and protest marches remind the world that China is still the world’s largest dictatorship.

{mosimage}The release of the Bouchard-Taylor report May 22 on reasonable accommodation of religious and ethnic differences in Quebec offered a useful corrective to some of the alarmism creeping into public debate on this issue. As one of the first official and systematic examinations of how Canadians integrate newcomers into our midst, it holds valuable lessons for all of us.

{mosimage}No one says being an Ontario Catholic school trustee in these times is easy. The vast majority of trustees recognize, too, that theirs is a vocation with few rewards and a grinding workload. So the temptation to ease that burden in questionable ways may be understandable — even as succumbing to it is never acceptable.

{mosimage}Economists — practitioners of the “gloomy science” — are gleefully telling us the party’s over. The boom times have disappeared, pffft, into thin air, replaced by recession and unemployment. But statisticians are now saying that most Canadians were not even invited to the party to begin with.

{mosimage}A century ago, on Sept. 23, Msgr. E. Alfred Burke, a priest of the diocese of Charlottetown, started a small organization that would go on to do very big things indeed. It was the Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada, now known as Catholic Missions In Canada (see article here).

April 24, 2008

Freedom's foes

{mosimage}If there is still any lingering scepticism among Canada’s opinion makers about the worrisome ambitions of the country’s human rights tribunals, it should be dispelled by the latest statement from Ontario Human Rights Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall.

April 17, 2008

It's all political

{mosimage}China, the International Olympic Committee and diehard Olympic supporters continue to repeat the mantra that we should leave politics out of the Olympic Games. Since when? we might ask.

April 11, 2008

Counsel of despair

{mosimage}The dictionary defines misanthropy as “hatred or mistrust of humankind.” Over the last few months there has been an awful lot of that going around.

This attitude has displayed itself in increased chattering in the media (where else?) that responsible global citizens should refrain from reproducing in order to do their bit to save the environment. One less mouth to feed, or in contemporary terms, one less carbon footprint to mar planet Earth.

June 27, 2008

It gets worse

{mosimage}Over the last few months, we’ve been warning about the power of the federal and provincial human rights tribunals and their willingness to abuse this power to trample on the Constitution. Yet our fear was more about the potential for greater abuse, rather than existing practice.

However, events are moving more rapidly than expected — and for the worse. A decision by the Alberta Human Rights Commission represents the most flagrant abuse of constitutional rights yet demonstrated across the country.