Forty years ago, I moved to Alberta from Saskatchewan imbued with the stereotype that my new province was full of cowboys, fundamentalists and wealthy oil barons who cared nothing about the environment. It didn’t take me long to realize that while there was truth in the stereotype, Alberta had numerous people who fell outside this cartoonish caricature.

Calls for reinvigorating religious public life within our seeming secular monoculture have traditionally relied heavily on morally grounded arguments.

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. 

When I started out on the Church on the Street, I gave little thought to some of the logistics of such a ministry apart from determining that it would be 8 p.m. onwards every Thursday evening.

Last week’s record financial award to a man abused by a monstrous priest 50 years ago is cringeworthy on many levels.

Our small English-language parish in a borough of Montreal is hardly a hot bed of serious surprises. Recently, though, we received some rather hard news.

We were all lined up at our desks, blank forms at the ready an plenty of pens for St. Michael’s parishioners to use. 

Why won’t Pope Francis issue a formal apology for the Catholic Church’s role in Canada’s residential school system? 

Pope Francis has long held in esteem the late Cardinal Francois-Xavier Nguyen van Thuan, the archbishop of Saigon who spent 13 years in a communist prison camp, including nine years in solitary confinement.