The movement to establish a branch of Pax Christi in Canada takes a step forward in April when the international movement’s secretary general will propose that Catholics For Peace, Toronto and a similar group in Montreal become affiliate members of the Brussels-based network.

TORONTO - A man known to the courts only as John Doe is sitting in a jail in Nebraska waiting for a decision from a Canadian judge. He’s a Colombian in the United States because the rebel FARC army has shot at his family and threatened his life, but he is barred from applying for asylum because he has been in the United States for more than a year.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Anyone who thought a look back at 20th-century history through the eyes of prayer would be comforting, uplifting or anodyne might want to begin with the 1919 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

{mosimage}The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has declined an invitation to sign a letter from faith leaders to Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Afghanistan because it doesn’t go far enough. The letter from a dozen church leaders asks Harper’s government to engage in negotiations with willing representatives of the Taliban and change the focus of Canadian operations in Afghanistan to diplomacy and aid.

{mosimage}From cell phone conversations about what the boss may have told a colleague about his boss, to an Internet blog reporting what insiders are saying about a movie still in production, and TV shows filled with breathless revelations about celebrity marriages and sports pages filled with whispers about athletes at loggerheads with teammates and coaches, Canadians are daily floating in a sea of gossip.

{mosimage}The moment for Canada to beat its own swords into ploughshares, to transform its own spears into pruning hooks and to work so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation may have finally arrived with the defection of a former chair of Amnesty International into Canada’s nascent Catholic peace camp.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Canada’s biggest bank has just crashed the socially responsible investing party as lining up investments with values goes more mainstream.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Neither Canada nor the G8 nations are living up to their obligations to Africa when it comes to fighting AIDS or alleviating poverty, the Canadian director of the African Jesuit AIDS Network told The Catholic Register at the conclusion of the latest G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany.

{mosimage}The St. Francis Xavier University political science professor who made headlines in 2006 by attending an Iranian conference on the Holocaust along with leading Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis has accused Antigonish’s Bishop Raymond Lahey and St. Francis Xavier University of being the “distilled voice of Canadian Islamophobia” in an essay published in the Literary Review of Canada.

{mosimage}TORONTO - As two 17-year-old boys prepare to face a judge over the shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Manners in a Toronto school hallway, the ecumenical Church Council on Justice and Corrections continues its fight against mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes.