Fr. Clair Watrin, the Basilian priest from southern Alberta who founded the ecumenical Live-In weekend retreat movement and Catholic Christian Outreach, has died at age 91. Both of those movements brought thousands of people into a deeper relationship with Jesus and His Church.

The first I heard of Fr. Ron Rolheiser was when I was a bushy-tailed editor of the Western Catholic Reporter in Edmonton still in my 20s. An article he had written showed up in the mail one sunny day in 1982 from Belgium where he was studying, and he wanted to know if we would publish it. The subject was revirginization, a possibility that had never previously crossed my mind. Nevertheless, the brilliance of the article astonished me, and I eagerly published it as well as another article he sent.

Alexey Navalny was surely a hero. Perhaps he was also a saint. Little evidence is available to buttress the hope that he might someday be recognized as such. Navalny, the Russian dissident who died/was murdered Feb. 16, spoke little of his conversion from militant atheism to Christian Orthodoxy during his abbreviated life.

In 1949, Abbé Pierre, a young French priest, welcomed Georges Legay, a homeless man who had tried to commit suicide, into his rundown home in Paris. Instead of giving Legay housing, work and money, Abbé Pierre said, “You are totally miserable, and I have nothing to give you. So why not help me help others?”

Ash Wednesday is on the horizon. While Catholics are getting ashes on our foreheads, much of the rest of the Western world will be buying chocolates and flowers. I don’t remember Ash Wednesday falling on Valentine’s Day previously. Google says the last time was in 1945, a little before my time.

On the evening of Saturday, Jan. 13, the Alberta Emergency Management Agency sent a province-wide alert on people’s cellphones stating that the province’s electrical grid was at high risk of having to implement rotating power outages. The day had been bitterly cold across Canada, including Alberta where all-time low temperatures were recorded.

This new year has rolled in with a sense of helplessness in the face of major crises facing humanity. How do we have any realistic expectation of overcoming:

Angels are in the spotlight during Advent and Christmas. There is Gabriel’s appearance to Mary, the angels who came to Joseph in three separate dreams, the multitude of angels who appear to the shepherds and the angel’s warning for the wise men to avoid Herod. Then there is the plethora of angels who decorate our Christmas festivities, both secular and religious.

Recently, I have been thinking about indifference, which seems to me to be the defining attitude of our times. At least, I thought of indifference as an attitude. Then I was asked to reflect on a statement by St. Teresa of Kolkata which included these words: “The greatest evil in the world is the lack of love, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbour.”

I love Israel. But I hate what it is doing in Gaza. I yearn for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Middle East. But Hamas, especially its Oct. 7 raids on Israel, is the greatest obstacle to that state becoming reality.