Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza is the pastor of Sacred Heart of Mary parish on Wolfe Island, and chaplain at Newman House at Kingston, Ont.’s Queen’s University.

It is déjà vu all over again for Canadian bishops who travelled to Rome for the Vatican’s meeting on the protection of minors in the Church.

For several years now, Catholic refugee policy — articulated passionately and repeatedly by the Holy See and many national bishops’ conferences — has focused on the urgent secondary thing, rather than the most important primary thing.

An alumna of our Newman House chaplaincy at Queen’s University offers an inspiring model of reading — of actual books. 

Ever since Watergate, scandals have been covered according to the adage: “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.”

Is living the teaching of Humanae Vitae regarding the moral means of managing fertility burdensome? Yes, and effective pastoral support for couples who are attempting to do just that — using natural family planning (NFP) rather than contraception — is served by acknowledging that up front. NFP is a burden.

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.

Next month will mark the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Blessed Paul VI which  reaffirmed the immorality of contraception at a time when many in the Church and the world expected a change.