VATICAN – The twin canonizations — along with five others — of Pope St. Paul VI and St. Oscar Romero prompted many to look for similarities between the two. But the more suggestive similarity is between “San Romero” — as they call him in El Salvador — and the pope whose 40th anniversary is marked this week.

I am looking forward to my next visit to Holy Family Church on King Street West in Toronto. It was my home for two years in the 1990s when I was a student at St. Philip’s Seminary, which is attached to the parish. 

Thanks to the excellent coverage by Salt + Light Television, I was able to follow the “Catholica 200” celebrations in St. Boniface, Man., marking the bicentennial of the arrival of the first French missionaries in the Canadian West. 

The summer of 1968, with France undergoing a social revolution and America burning, was not a congenial time for a reaffirmation of traditional morality in face of the sexual revolution. But the courageous Blessed Paul VI did just that in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, published 50 years ago this month.

A former student sent me a notice that caught my attention, for both artistic and pious reasons. The Cantata Singers of Ottawa will be at St. Joseph’s Church later this month where the entire program will consist of settings of the brief Eucharistic and Marian hymn, Ave Verum, including those of Lassus, Byrd, Mozart, Elgar, Liszt, Saint-Saëns and Poulenc. 

Fr. Thomas Rosica, CEO of Salt & Light Catholic Media Foundation, published a blistering assessment of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the pages of a Jesuit magazine, identifying in practice what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger memorably called the “dictatorship of relativism.”