Even for pro-lifer Catholics labouring in the political trenches, it must seem a blessing in disguise that abortion has so far failed to get off the ground as a federal election issue.

Could this most troubling of summers for the Catholic Church across Canada spark its resurgence as a vital participant in the country’s public life? Call me a sun-addled optimist, but I carry a conviction it can so long as we avoid thinking of a phoenix rising from ashes and instead heed the Gospel call to commit ourselves to the long, hard, patient work of building Christ’s Church.

In mid-July, my wife had the opportunity to interview a 92-year-old former opera star at her home in a village between Quebec City and Montreal.

Forgive me for regarding with a somewhat dry eye my fellow Canadians’ umbrage gusting to apoplexy over the infamy of Indian Residential Schools, and Catholic blame for same.

It is heartening to see Catholic clergy calling out the stream of inaccuracies and exaggerations around the Church’s responsibility for the residential schools debacle.

There’s a unique wallop in seeing your hometown linked by national and international media to the finding of a “mass grave” full of children.

Five minutes into a recent online retreat, I felt myself going spiritually backwards.

What Ottawa won’t do for cats it might end up doing to Catholics, warns a former CRTC vice-chair and leading critic of controversial changes to the federal Broadcasting Act.

Unfurling Bernadette Devlin, Quebec’s Catholic bishops, Irish nuns and William F. Buckley Jr. in the same thought, never mind one sentence, might be considered psychologically, even rhetorically, impossible. Well, there it is. Impossibility vanquished. 

Amid the deep shadows of ever-expanding MAiD and examples of hospice care being brutally extinguished, a gesture of transformation by the Archdiocese of Montreal lights a candle in the dark.