Changes to Canada's refugee system are being denounced  by the sponsorship community as a cap on compassion and generosity.

A February letter from Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney  to churches and non-profits that sponsor refugees revealed plans to limit the number of refugees Canadians would be allowed to sponsor under the Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. Kenney calls it a "different kind of stewardship." The government is also unilaterally altering its contracts with Sponsorship Agreement Holders, ending all agreements as of Dec. 31, 2011.

"Putting a cap on the number of refugee applications can mean putting a limit on the generosity of Canadians," said Canadian Council for Refugees director Janet Dench.

With campaign jets soaring over the land and campaign buses rolling down highways, it’s sometimes easy for Canadians to be cynical about the honesty of politicians. But truth in politics still matters to Canadians, and politicians recognize it, said Prof. Richard Feist, dean of the faculty of philosophy at Ottawa’s Saint Paul University.

“The incumbent party certainly does not say something like, ‘Well, so what if we were defeated on non-confidence, or not providing (information).’ ” said Feist. “They want to talk as if ‘No, we were defeated on the budget.’ ”

Feist runs the Masters in Public Ethics program at Saint Paul, training civil servants in the philosophy of honesty. Truth, who tells the truth and whether citizens can recognize it, is important in how we run our politics and how we run our country, he said.

Jesuit Fr. Gilles Mongeau has been cultivating an occassional community of artists who gather once or twice a year for an artists' liturgy. On the feast of St. Joseph, March 26, the artists' liturgy took the form of morning prayer from the Divine Office.

The singers contributing to this liturgy, and singing as you view these photographs, are the 46-member Cantores Celestes.

The amatuer women's choir has been singing together for 22 years, and over those years has raised more than $30,000 for charity. Singing for a liturgy rather than a concert allows the choir to connect with its repertoire of religious music in a very different way, said conductor Kelly Galbraith.

...

View the images in the slideshow that is embedded below or click here to load a larger version in a new window.

Use the small icon, , in the bottom right corner of the player to view the slideshow in full-screen mode.

 

Who would want to choose between the morality of indecision and fear versus the morality of blind, reckless gambles imposed on future generations? Whether we want it or not, the nuclear question awaits.

Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission began three weeks of hearings March 21 at Hope Fellowship Church in Courtice, Ont., on future plans for the Darlington Nuclear Station near Bowmanville, Ont., about 50 km east of Toronto. There are plans for four new nuclear reactors at the station on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Hundreds of written submissions were already before the nuclear regulator before the world was riveted to its television screens, watching Japan’s Fukushima 50 (in fact, about 200 technicians and engineers) fight to keep their crippled nuclear power plant from killing hundreds of thousands of people in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunamis that struck Japan March 11.

Who would want to choose between the morality of indecision and fear versus the morality of blind, reckless gambles imposed on future generations? Whether we want it or not, the nuclear question awaits.

Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission began three weeks of hearings March 21 at Hope Fellowship Church in Courtice, Ont., on future plans for the Darlington Nuclear Station near Bowmanville, Ont., about 50 km east of Toronto. There are plans for four new nuclear reactors at the station on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Hundreds of written submissions were already before the nuclear regulator before the world was riveted to its television screens, watching Japan’s Fukushima 50 (in fact, about 200 technicians and engineers) fight to keep their crippled nuclear power plant from killing hundreds of thousands of people in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunamis that struck Japan March 11.

You could vote on Good Friday, Holy Saturday or even Easter Monday, but you don’t have to and nobody should take offence that Elections Canada has chosen dates for advance polling that coincide with Easter, said Philip Horgan.

“Let’s not get too bogged down in minutia when there are bigger issues at stake here,” said Horgan, president of the Canadian Catholic Civil Rights League.

The bigger issues for the league include documenting the voting records of MPs on issues such as euthanasia and appealing an Ontario judge’s decision that would decriminalize street prostitution and bawdy houses. So their noses should not be out of joint over a voluntary advance polling date.

It’s hard to know what will be decided in the May 2 election, but it’s just as hard to imagine that Canadians will decide well unless we inject respect, sincerity, honesty and a few high-minded ideals into our political culture.

We can’t run a country on vitriolic rhetoric, political tactics and cheap-shot ads, said Christian think-tank director Peter Stockland. Looking at the latest attack ads turned Stockland’s stomach.

“I was absolutely appalled that a government and a lot of people in that government would unleash something like that,” said the director of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal. “Where’s the charity?”

The Conservative ads claim Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is dangerously soft on crime, and a Liberal government would make people unsafe in their homes and neighbourhoods.

TORONTO - Climate change deniers aren’t what worries KAIROS’ Dorothy McDougall. She worries about Christians who can’t let go of a lifestyle that contradicts the Gospel.

“This is about the accumulation of stuff and the planned obsolescence of stuff,” said McDougall, the ecumenical church-based group’s climate change expert. “For Christians to be in solidarity with those who suffer the ravages of climate change in Africa, in Latin America and in the north means transitioning to a carbon-free economy.”

But most of us don’t want to give up our throw-away lifestyles and don’t want to ask what Jesus would think of houses full of stuff, she said.

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - About 140 ex-Anglicans and their Catholic friends spent March 24 to 26 getting a feel for what may turn out to be their new spiritual home in the Roman Catholic Church.

A conference on Anglicanorum Coetibus at Queen of Apostles Renewal Centre in Mississauga gave people an up-close look at what a future personal ordinariate for former Anglicans might look like.

Until now, Catholic-leaning Anglicans have found themselves with a choice between a "theologically alien though culturally familiar" church, or jumping to a Roman Catholic Church that is culturally alien though theologically secure, Dominican theologian and historian Fr. Aidan Nichols told the conference. A former Anglican himself, Nichols said there is more to feeling at home in a church than theological agreement.

 

TORONTO - Twenty theology professors and librarians at Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College have won a slam-dunk ruling from the Ontario Labour Relations Board unionizing the faculty and obliging the college to negotiate a first contract.

The ruling not only recognized the St. Michael’s College profs as unionized workers seeking a contract, but ruled that all 2,600-plus faculty at the University of Toronto are in fact union members.

Before the March 17 ruling, the University of Toronto Faculty Association wasn’t formally a union, even though it negotiated minimum work conditions for university teachers and librarians, including pay, academic freedom, research and study leaves, workload, etc.

“What the board is really saying is that the nature of the relationship between the parties has the essential characteristics of a relationship between an employer and a union,” said Canadian Association of University Teachers executive director James Turk.