Facebook can’t replace a human face, but it can bring it closer.

ShareLife, the charitable fundraising arm of the archdiocese of Toronto, relies on human faces to get its message out and bring dollars in. But social media — including Facebook and Twitter — are bringing in more and more dollars and reaching out to more and more donors.

“ShareLife began as a grassroots movement with people canvassing door-to-door,” said ShareLife communications manager Bill Steinburg.

The countdown is on to a Dec. 1 D-Day for the next five years of funding for the Canadian bishops’ international development agency.

The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace has been quietly working the past two years on its proposal to spend almost $50 million of Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) money over the next five years. Development and Peace has been combining CIDA funding with donations almost since the organization was founded in 1967.

Passchendaele, Vimy, the Somme, Hill 70 and Flanders Fields are all still there more than 90 years after they swallowed the lives of Canadian farm boys and office clerks. The once scarred and rutted fields of mud have been transformed by green grass, monuments, grave markers and crosses.

“It’s a vast memorial,” said writer Susan Evans Shaw.

Evans Shaw has produced a 350-page guidebook to the battlefields of the First World War called simply Canadians at War. The book is dramatically and amply illustrated with photographs by Jean Crankshaw.

Thinking in catholic terms about a global economy ought to be natural. Catholic means global, universal, transcending boundaries. But a Catholic proposal for regulating the global economy has stirred a battle between left and right within the Church.

The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s “note” — issued in advance of the G20 meeting that opened Nov. 3 in Cannes, France — proposed a gradual evolution toward global governance of finance and trade.

On the right the proposal has been dismissed as “rubbish, rubbish, rubbish” by American conservative George Weigel of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Centre. Weigel dismisses the Pontifical Council as “a rather small office in the Roman Curia” without much standing in relation to the teaching office of the Church.

TORONTO - In the hours before Pope Benedict XVI and world religious leaders gathered again at Assisi, in the name of St. Francis and in the name of peace, the Toronto Area Interfaith Council brought together Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Bahais, Zoroastrians, Protestants, Scientologists, First Nations and Roman Catholics to share songs, Scriptures and prayers dedicated to peace.

About 60 people were there Oct. 26 in the Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity behind the Eaton Centre for an interfaith service that included chanted readings from the Koran, a prayer for peace attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a passage from the First Letter of St. Peter and the Peace Prayer of St. Francis.

"May there be peace in the celestial bodies, may there be peace on this little planet, may there be peace among us, may there be peace within us," said Hindu Institute of Learning vice president Chander Khanna, translating from the Vedas.

TORONTO - There are 29,000 Catholics held captive behind a rusty, two-metre high, chain-link fence in the middle of downtown Toronto. Mind you, they’re not clamouring to get out. They’re dead and buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery, a little south of St. Clair Avenue and hidden behind the stores on the west side of Yonge Street.

Martha Crean and Mary Egan want to get in. Each of them is related to early sextons (maintenance men) of the 156-year-old cemetery. They have relatives buried there and they would like to see the historic gem opened and advertised to Torontonians.

Vandalism, dog-walking, skiing, neighbourhood fireworks displays, baseball games and litter on the cemetery grounds forced Catholic Cemeteries, Archdiocese of Toronto to lock the gates in 2005, said executive director Richard Hayes in an e-mail to Crean and Egan.

TORONTO - While Toronto’s Coptic Catholics drive their kids to school each morning, show up for work every day and go home to their families in the evening, part of them is living in the Shubra district of Cairo.

They fear for families back home in Shubra. They say relatives they left in Egypt are by turns fearful about the future and their personal safety or marching in the streets. But none predict a refugee crisis on the scale of Iraq’s exodus of Christians.

An Oct. 9 army attack on Coptic demonstrators that killed 26 and injured more than 300 Shubra residents hasn’t really changed the situation, Toronto Copts told The Catholic Register after Mass at Holy Family Coptic Catholic Church Oct. 23.

TORONTO - Mary Jo Leddy, co-founder of Toronto's Romero House, has discovered a school for Christian living. She has learned to live a Christian life by spending her days and nights among people who have been cut adrift by the violent politics and harsh economics we are usually sheltered from in Canada.

Leddy launched her new book The Other Face of God: When the Stranger Calls Us Home [click here to buy] at Regis College Oct. 20. The book is a spiritual guide to the practical, legal and bureaucratic process of settling refugees in this country. She has spent more than 20 years struggling against what she calls the bureaucratic absurdities and moral blindness of Canada's refugee system.

"Systems supposedly designed to do good develop routines of indifference, procedures for acceptable cruelty," she writes in the 150-page Novalis book.

TORONTO - Nobody is claiming Occupy Toronto protesters are a Catholic crowd. Not many have Bibles and copies of Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical in their backpacks. But it's amazing how many echoes of Scripture and Catholic social teaching there are in the worldwide Occupy movement, say Scripture scholars and social teaching experts.

"The issue is Mammon. To me it's very biblical," said Redemptorist Father Paul Hansen, director of the Redemptorist Biblical Justice Consultancy.

Hansen spent a day among the protesters camped out next to the Anglican St. James Cathedral in downtown Toronto. The demands he heard reminded him of Jesus cleansing the temple (John 2:13-25).

TORONTO - The foundation that supports Catholic Family Services of Toronto doesn’t know how to solve the problem of men beating up and bullying their wives and girlfriends, but they know one thing we should be doing about it. They want us to pray.

Catholic Family Services of Toronto Foundation is bringing Catholics together to pray for victims, families and even the abusers at its second annual Mass to End Woman Abuse Nov. 3. This year the Mass will be held 6 p.m. at St. Clare’s Church, 1118 St. Clair Ave. W., with Fr. Vito Marziliano presiding.

The Mass will offer prayers for women and for healing, said Mary Benincasa of St. Clare’s parish.