When I was a young journalist, I joined the Volunteers, a group associated with the Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate (OMMI), a secular institute, and began to take part in their regular discussion groups. Early on, we discussed the five elements of the OMMI spirituality. 

A good friend of mine, a fellow scotch aficionado, sent me a story which is an adaptation of a well-known leadership story, popularized by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. 

Francis Campbell’s column last week about a 200-year-old teapot, a story steeped in family history and faith, brought to mind a three-decade-old tale about another family heirloom.

It’s an impossibly tight deadline that the Trudeau government has deliberately created, but one we must respond to with great urgency. 

It’s true there’s a challenge, to say the least, in seeing the “bigger picture” when the picture’s focus is life and death itself.

We Catholics are at times indifferent about those things that should deeply concern us but obsessed by those things that should be water off our backs. 

The phrase “thoughts and prayers” has become so common it has its own Wikipedia page. The page outlines in detail the use of the expression by prominent public figures in times of crisis — most notably following natural disasters or American gun violence — and also offers both a criticism and defence of this practice. 

I was driving to Nova Scotia with my wife Ria several years ago when we stopped at a garden centre. Since I cannot tell a weed from a wallflower, I hung out in the knickknack section where people can find garden signs that say things like, “I don’t remember planting this.”

When Pope Celestine V resigned as pope in 1294, he removed his papal garb and intended to return to life as a hermit. However, his successor, Pope Boniface VIII, placed him under house arrest where he remained until his death 10 months later. 

When Pope Francis accepted the resignation of the bishop of Philadelphia on Jan. 23, some in media were painting it as pushing the pontiff’s so-called agenda aimed at moving the Church away from traditionalists.