Peter Stockland

Peter Stockland

Peter Stockland is the publisher of The Catholic Register.

March 29, 2023

The man in the mitre

An interview with Francis Leo, Canada's youngest bishop heading its largest English-speaking diocese.

His Grace Francis Leo offered up gratitude to Christ as he was made Archbishop of Toronto at a Mass in a packed St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica that was equally filled with the spirit of the Annunciation.

About mid-way through his speech at what conceivably might be his last Cardinal’s dinner, Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins paused and seemed to lean into the podium just after articulating the word homeless.

October 14, 2022

Division by ‘ism’

As a child, I was fishing off a wooden dock at the small lake near the town in B.C. where I grew up when a farmer from Saskatchewan and his son appeared  as if out of a dream I didn’t know I was having.

The Toronto archdiocese’s St. Monica Institute opened its doors Sept. 24 although Executive Director Matthew Marquardt acknowledges that technically it doesn’t yet have any doors to open.

In summer 2021, I had the pleasure on the local public golf course where I play to be part of a foursome of walk-ons that included a diminutive albeit athletic 30-something Asian woman.

I once interviewed the Irish Times columnist and author John Waters, a very devout and public Catholic, about changes roiling through Irish society that were creating pressures to amend the Constitution in areas such as abortion and gay marriage. I noted that despite the Church’s long dominance over Irish politics, an equally long-standing antipathy toward it could be found in figures such as James Joyce.

In the past two months, courts gave the go-ahead for class-action lawsuits involving 100 plaintiffs alleging sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Quebec and the Diocese of St. Hyacinthe near Montreal.

Pretty much a primary requirement for all-candidate debates in any election is that a government candidate be there to debate why the government should be re-elected.

As Archbishop Christian Lépine moved through the last days of Lent toward Easter 2022, he acknowledged the worst Cross to bear in his 10 years leading Montreal Roman Catholics has been the scandal of clerical sexual abuse.