Michael Swan, The Catholic Register

Michael Swan, The Catholic Register

Michael is Associate Editor of The Catholic Register.

He is an award-winning writer and photographer and holds a Master of Arts degree from New York University.

Follow him on Twitter @MmmSwan, or click here to email him.

Associate Editor Michael Swan is in Rome to report on the conclave. Selecting a pope is a world event, but that doesn’t mean it lacks a Canadian perspective. Here Swan looks at Canada and the conclave.

With just one more session of meetings to go, the cardinals who have gathered in Rome have decided to lock themselves in the Sistine Chapel and start the conclave to choose a new pope on Tuesday, March 12.

There was severe hardship but no famine in West Africa last year. Crops failed, locusts and other insects consumed farmers’ fields and at least 18 million people suffered through a food shortage.

A week before Israeli Apartheid Week is set to send Canadian universities into their annual turmoil over the Middle East, a group of young Israelis are storming campuses armed with a capacity for conversation.

Catholic Register Associate Editor Michael Swan filed this report while on his way to Rome to cover the conclave to elect a new pope.

TORONTO - Though some were due back in class in an hour or two and others were generations removed from their last lecture, everybody at Fr. Robert J. Madden’s funeral Feb. 20 was there as a student paying respect to a great teacher.

TORONTO - You won’t find the word “savagery” in most economic textbooks, but neither will you find the word “faith.” But savagery and faith are the words Jesuit Archbishop Ricardo Barreto of Huancayo, Peru, uses to describe the economic choices before Latin America.

TORONTO - If food be the music of love and of life, why should the elderly be stuck with Muzak? Why another bland tray of dietician-approved starch, protein, carbohydrates, fats and fibre?

TORONTO - Cardinal Thomas Collins is joining thousands who want Vision TV to remain on basic cable so that its religious programming continues to be available to the widest possible audience.

TORONTO - A bishop in the remote northern Kachin State of Myanmar has asked Catholic Register readers for their prayers as Caritas Myanmar struggles to care for at least 100,000 internally displaced people in camps in and around his diocese.