The Truth and Reconciliation Commission looking into Canada’s 130-year history of residential schools for native children may not have enough money to finish the job.

The commission was set up in 2008 with a five-year mandate and a $60-million budget. After an initial false start, the commission is now scheduled to produce a final report by 2014.

“The original amount set aside in the Settlement Agreement may need to be revisited,” said the commission’s most recent annual departmental performance report to the Treasury Board.

TORONTO - Our Lady of Mercy is back in Toronto, gleaming and armed with the latest technology while making room for families, children and newborn babies.

St. Joseph's Health Centre blessed its new, four-story patient care wing Dec. 5. The new wing carries on the name of the old Our Lady of Mercy Hospital. The original Our Lady of Mercy merged with St. Joseph's in 1980 and finally closed in 1998.

The new $73-million, 130,000-square-foot wing adds a neonatal intensive care unit, a family birthing centre, a pediatric unit with six surgical day care beds and six medical day care beds, 92 more adult inpatient beds and a child and adolescent mental health unit which includes a full-time classroom.

TORONTO - It's a hallway and a museum and an innovative therapy all at the same time. Providence Healthcare unveiled its Memory Lane to three dozen Sisters of St. Joseph, benefactors and friends Nov. 30.

The hallway is full of memorabilia from the history of the Toronto hospital and the Sisters who built it up from nothing in 1851 to one of Canada's leading rehabilitation hospitals. Providence Healthcare patients battling memory loss are often encouraged to spend time with the Memory Lane's interactive displays to discover what memories old typewriters, nuns' habits, furniture, etc. will stir up.

The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace believes Canadians may be eating the planet to death, so they’re going to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to nudge the world into a whole new food system.

Next June the United Nations Development Program will host Rio+20, a conference aimed at evaluating progress since the landmark Rio Earth Summit of 1992. Development and Peace is one of several Catholic organizations planning on attending.

“For us, responsible care of the planet is part of our campaign. It’s part of our five-year theme. We see it as a priority issue,” said Development and Peace program officer Mary Durran.

Catholic agencies that help immigrants and refugees settle in Ontario don’t know how they will cope with their share of a $31.5-million funding cut to settlement agencies in Ontario.

This year’s cuts come on top of $42.5 million shaved off Ontario’s allotment for settling and retraining immigrants last year. Over two years, Ontario has lost 20 per cent of its funding from Citizenship and Immigration for services to newcomers, according to the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants.

“We’re trying to make some plans and think through how we would react to a variety of different levels of cutbacks,” said Catholic Cross-Cultural Services executive director Carolyne Davis.

TORONTO - Toronto’s first run at the new Sacramentary hit a few rough spots but didn’t upset many parishioners.

“I didn’t notice a lot of difference. It was more what the priest says, I think,” noted Our Lady of Lourdes parishioner Peter Maigher at the end of the 11:30 a.m. Sunday Mass. Maigher’s reaction was typical of what churchgoers told The Catholic Register at Nov. 26-27 Masses.

TORONTO - After two decades of annual report cards on child and family poverty, Campaign 2000 is still waiting for the federal government to play a role in poverty reduction, said Laurel Rothman as she unveiled the 2011 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty Nov. 23.

"Don't let anybody tell you that it really is any better than in 1989 when the Parliament of Canada vowed to come up with an immediate plan," said Campaign 2000 director Rothman.

TORONTO - Incarnation is the art of God. But the art that Ballet Creole practises has the same inspiration.

This year will be the 10th time the Toronto company dances the Soulful Messiah. It will also be its 10th version of the Christmas favourite set to Quincy Jones’ jazz-gospel-funk reinterpretation of Handel’s masterwork.

Each year the dance piece grows a little, sheds some skin, discovers a new wrinkle in the music, said choreographer and artistic director Patrick Parson.

Plans to put an outdoor, industrial recycling facility next door to the Martyrs' Shrine have shocked the Jesuits and galvanized a campaign to protect the environmentally sensitive Wye Marsh.

The Jesuits are asking Midland, Ont.'s town councillors to reverse their decision to rezone a site to allow Recycling Specialties Inc. to bring in truckloads of metal, paper, cardboard, wood, plastic and other material for sorting and processing.

Neither the Jesuits who run Martyrs' Shrine nor Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons — a provincial park built around a recreation of the first Christian settlement in Ontario and the graves of St. Jean de Brébeuf and St. Gabriel Lallemant — were notified before the zoning change on April 26.  Previously zoned highway commercial, the land directly across from the front steps of the shrine is now zoned industrial. The direct neighbours of the site fell outside of the Ontario Planning Act's mandatory 120-metre notification zone and on the other side of the town's border with the Township of Tay.

Former parishioners at two North Bay, Ont., churches have taken their bishop to court in Rome in an attempt to force him to reopen their already closed, deconsecrated and sold churches.

The groups of former parishioners from St. Rita's and Corpus Christi have submitted long-form appeals to the Congregation for the Clergy asking that the churches be reopened for Catholic worship of some kind. The groups argue that their churches were not closed for a valid and grave reason, as required under canon law.

Leader of the Corpus Christi appeal, Phillip Penna, believes they can persuade Rome to rule in their favour because their case is exactly parallel to that of three parishes in Springfield, Mass. In early November the Apostolic Signatura (Rome's highest court) ordered that the three Spingfield churches must remain open for worship.