TORONTO - At 14 Neola Husbands decided she couldn’t continue living at home with her father and his new wife. At 18 she’s starting her second year at McGill University in Montreal, her first year in the bachelor of commerce program, while she shores up a business plan that she hopes will launch a career in fashion.

The bridge between a violent home and a bright future for Husbands has been group homes run by the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto.

On Aug. 22 Husbands was one of 100 former CCAS youth in care to receive a scholarship from the Hope for Children foundation. She planned to use the $2,000 she received for tuition — absorbing a small part of the burden of debt she would otherwise face as a university student with no parental support.

Foster kids graduate out of the children’s aid system at 18. At the age when most high school graduates are getting some help from their parents in realizing their post-secondary dreams, kids like Husbands have to make it on their own.

TORONTO - There are lots of numbers associated with Sept. 11, 2001. More than 3,000 people were killed including 19 hijackers. Another 6,000+ people were injured. There were nearly three million square metres of Manhattan office space damaged or destroyed. New York’s gross domestic product declined $27.3 billion in the 15 months following the attacks.

Nobody counts the number of prayers.

At the Newman Centre at the University of Toronto, Fr. Pat O’Dea watched in horror at the face of evil revealed on television — “That’s all it is, pure evil,” he said. But he also watched in wonder at the outpouring of prayer on the downtown campus.

All week long the St. Thomas Aquinas Church remained open for anyone who wanted to pray, and hundreds did, recalled O’Dea, who was pastor at the Newman Centre at the time.

By some estimates, the Church has formally recognized and honoured more than 10,000 saints. There have been saints ever since the first century. In the long history of the Church, Catholics have even celebrated and prayed to saints who never existed (St. Christopher, St. Ursula). Pope John Paul II himself declared 482 saints over his 28-year papacy.

The process of canonization normally stretches over a generation or more. Some causes for saints have been maintained over a century before finally making the grade.

For Catholics, all this effort put into saint-making is not a sideshow, not a frill, not the arcane nonsense of the canon law hobbyist. Saints are essential to our communion. We are not who we profess to be without the communion of the saints.

For those of us whose 21st-century lives are defined more by the Internet, our genetic codes and dollars that ricochet around the world at the speed of light, it might be difficult to imagine how the life of a 19th-century farm boy who grew up to offer healing through St. Joseph, holy oil and prayer could possibly matter to us.

In his new devotional book about Br. Andre, Fr. George Madore imaginatively meditates on the life of Canada’s first male native-born saint. Madore’s meditation brings him to a conclusion that he makes the title of the book — Brother André: A Saint for Today.

Brother André will be canonized in the province that has the lowest church attendance of any place in North America. While 85 per cent of Quebeckers identify themselves as Roman Catholic, only 20 per cent attend church once a month, according to a 2007 study by sociologist Reginald Bibby.

Quebec society is distinct in its relationship with the Church, and the difference has a lot to do with Quebec’s unique history.

Thousands of people during Brother André’s lifetime and more since his death in 1937 have claimed the humble brother’s prayers healed them, cured them, made them whole. There are racks of abandoned crutches, canes and wheelchairs on display in St. Joseph’s Oratory.

The problem for the postulator of Brother André’s cause was how to decide on just one miracle to present to medical and theological experts. When Andrea Ambrosi became postulator of Brother André’s cause in 2002, he had to find the right miracle to move the cause forward.

It is probable that Brother André would not approve of being made a saint. Or perhaps not even comprehend it.

Once on a tour of the exile Quebecois towns of New England, the already famous Brother André arrived in a place where the priest and the whole French-speaking community anxiously waited. He was already known as the “Miracle Man of Montreal.” The Connecticut pastor had organized a procession and the people greeted Brother André with a great feast. The whole community turned out to pray the rosary.

Take a look at Za Aytiryya, the neighbourhood where Iraqi Christian refugees live in Beirut. Or take a tour the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus for a glimpse of a Muslim world. Or meet the child refugees whose lives are also on hold, waiting for resettlement.

These three slide shows give another view of the shrinking world of Iraqi refugees.

 

 

 

The 10,000-plus Iraqis in Lebanon have no legal status. Lebanon never signed the United Nations Convention on Refugees. The country has no legal or administrative mechanism to deal with a person seeking asylum of any kind. While it does recognize Palestinian refugees, they are an exception.

The police are not actively trying to round up refugees and put them in jail or send them out of the country. As long as they don’t wander out of the Christian neighbourhoods of Beirut or otherwise draw attention, authorities are willing to pretend they’re not there.

The biggest and best story of Deborah Amos’s 28-year career as a Middle East correspondent comes in the form of an eminently readable, fast-paced book about the Iraqi refugee crisis — Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile and Upheaval in the Middle East.

Amos spent five years among Iraq’s two million exiles, sipping tea with them in tiny, crumbling, empty apartments in the poor Geramana neighbourhood of Damascus, retracing their journeys from Baghdad by taxi, tracking them down after they resettled in the United States. Out of the whirlwind of “shock and awe” attacks on Baghdad in 2003, and the confusing rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and regime change and democratizing the Middle East, Amos discovered that the key to understanding what was happening in Iraq was in the people streaming out of Iraq.