TORONTO - A year after Pope Benedict XVI recognized Br. André as a saint, Toronto’s Archbishop Thomas Collins blessed a new statue of the humble doorman from Montreal and spoke about martyrdom as the universal call of all Christians.

The larger-than-life-size statue of the “Miracle Man of Montreal” is surrounded by panels showing the history of the Holy Cross Fathers and Brothers in North America from 1837 on. St. Br. André is shown welcoming a stranger with the keys of his office on his belt.

TORONTO - When Gail Ward started answering phones at Our Lady of Lourdes parish the first of Mackenzie King’s three Liberal governments was in its last days, the nation was still mourning nearly 70,000 dead from the First World War, the Scopes monkey trial was just underway in the United States, Pope Pius XI was establishing the Vatican as a sovereign state and the Great Depression was unthinkable.

She was 14 years old in 1925 and enjoying a game of tennis outside the rectory when she was asked to fill in for the missing parish secretary. It was the beginning of a career in parishes that spanned 80 years.

Along with every university in Canada, the nation’s Catholic colleges are stuffed to the gills with undergraduates. More than 90,000 Ontario students showed up for first-year classes this fall, almost 2,000 more than the double cohort year 2003, when the province’s universities were accepting two-years’ worth of high school graduates because Grade 13 had been eliminated.

“When I run a principal’s orientation session at the beginning of the year, I can only fit 250 into the room. We have 900 first-year students,” said David Sylvester, principal at King’s University College in London, Ont. “We can’t even fit them into a room to talk to them.”

Sylvester looks forward to running a more efficient orientation session in the fall of 2013, when the new $11-million Daryl J. King Student Life Centre will be completed. The new complex, designed to meet stringent environmental standards, will include a theatre, student union offices, informal meeting space, a cafe and games area and a learning commons.

It’s a new day for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The 104-year-old call to Christians to atone for their deliberate and structural estrangement from one another is employing Facebook, Twitter and the very latest publishing technology to get the word out.

Promoting the Week of Prayer via social media was basically a no-brainer as far as the Canadian Council of Churches is concerned, said CCC secretary general Rev. Dr. Karen Hamilton.

“It was just obvious, given that we are continually thinking through communications issues and paying attention to what’s going on,” said Hamilton.

Chai Ling, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and now the founder of the American NGO All Girls Allowed, believes China’s one-child policy is undermining the moral and spiritual values of the nation, going so far as to call what’s happening there a “gendercide” — a regime of coerced abortions that brings the state right into the wombs of China’s women and distorting Chinese culture and values.

“The one-child policy is becoming more than just a population control policy,” said Chai, author of the just-released book A Heart for Freedom. “It has become a policy of control of its own population — to put fear of the state into the hearts of women, into the most intimate part of the relationship between a man and a woman.”

Prayer and fasting is the only possible response to a military attack on civilian, Christian protesters, a Canadian Coptic priest in Egypt told The Catholic Register.

Fr. Bishoi Yassa Anis was just blocks away from a battle between Christian protesters and Egyptian soldiers on the streets of Cairo Oct. 9. Egyptian officials put the death toll at 26 with more than 300 injured.

While protests began with the destruction of a church in Aswan, the Cairo protests were trying to draw attention to a long series of attacks on churches since the government of Hosni Mubarak fell in March of this year, said Bishoi (Egyptian family names come first).

TORONTO - A new study by St. Michael’s Hospital that makes a link between poverty and poor health is being endorsed by Catholic agencies.

The Toronto study indicates that people instinctively understand that poverty and income disparity are dangerous to their health, said epidemiologist Patricia O’Campo, one of the authors of the study.

“It really is inequities that are driving risk for adverse health and mortality,” O’Campo said.

The accepted premise that religion is withering away in Canada is being debunked by a new study from Canada’s most published and quoted sociologist of religion, Reginald Bibby.

Bibby has just released numbers showing the percentage of Canadians committed to regular church attendance is rock solid. He largely attributes the continued vitality to a Catholic Church that is constantly renewing itself through immigration.

“If we were thinking, as so many people have been thinking, in terms of secularization — where religion is in retreat mode and things are bad and getting worse — we’re saying that really has been an interpretation that has been very inaccurate,” said the University of Lethbridge sociologist.

TORONTO - Composer Zane Zalis has a story to tell. Give him 90 minutes, 200 singers and a huge orchestra and Zalis will lead you through an emotional tale of the Holocaust.

I Believe is a 12-part oratorio that marshals enormous, complex orchestral forces but tells its story with popular, musical theatre singers. The work will get its Toronto premiere at Roy Thomson Hall Oct. 25 as a kind of lead-in to the 31st annual Holocaust Education Week, Nov. 1-9.

Zalis, who grew up Ukrainian Catholic but later slid his family over to the Roman rite, intended his oratorio to be educational and accessible to young listeners.

TORONTO - When Molly and Bill Callaghan went north to maintain a Chistian presence in small native communities they had years behind them of working in Toronto-area parishes as a deacon couple. Bill had the background in Scripture and theology that comes with the diaconate program while Molly had experience that goes with a lifetime of volunteering in the Church.

But none of that mattered very much, said Molly.

“We took an egg crate-sized box of stuff we had used in different days of recollection, training sessions, all of that,” Molly recently recalled of their 1991 trip to Sandy Lake, Ont. “We got up there and thought before we do anything about that we need to just be present to the people, keeping their trust and doing what we feel called to do. We came back (in 1998) with that box unopened.”