Catholic Register Editorial
The Catholic Register's editorial is published in the print and digital editions every week. Read the current and past editorials below.
Offering real hope
The Vatican is accustomed to accounts of miraculous recovery. But it didn’t take a miracle for Sharon Porter to captivate a recent gathering of cardinals, scientists, theologians and philosophers. Her story is not miraculous, just remarkable.
Porter suffers from systemic scleroderma, a dreadful auto-immune disease that causes hardening of the skin and internal organs, mobility problems and severe pain. There is no cure. But three years ago Porter’s own adult stem cells were used to rebuild her immune system and today she is virtually symptom free.
Why this matters in the Vatican is that, through the Pontifical Council for Culture, it recently signed a five-year, $1-million initiative with NeoStem, Inc., an American specialist in stem-cell research. Like the Church, NeoStem believes it is immoral — and unnecessary — to obtain stem cells by destroying embryos. It has aligned with the Church to promote adult stem cell research that is effective and ethical.
Opening doors
As anyone who has tried to sponsor a parent or grandparent into Canada can attest, our family reunification program is broken. So the immigration minister deserves credit for renovating it.
It’s unfortunate, however, that recent reforms announced by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to reduce a backlog of reunifications could adversely affect other desperate immigrants and refugees. The reforms will make it easier for the parents and grandparents of new Canadians to come here, but asylum seekers, economic migrants and people seeking humanitarian exemptions into Canada will soon be competing for fewer spaces.
Celebrate life
The birth of a baby should always be a celebration of God’s will being done. But much of the joy accompanying the arrival of tiny Danica May Camacho on Oct. 31 was offset by joyless fretting about the future of the planet.
Danica May, born in Manila, was one of several babies symbolically presented to the world on Halloween as the planet’s population reached seven billion, according to the United Nations Population Fund. She was the second child born to Catholic parents who subsist on the meagre salary of a Filipino bus driver. Naturally, they were delighted to welcome a new baby into their family.
Canada has a role
The death of dictator Moammar Gadhafi has silenced the guns and heralded a homecoming for 600 Canadians who participated in NATO sorties over Libya. But Gadhafi’s brutal exit should not mark the end of Canadian engagement in the North Africa nation.
Like the days that followed the overthrow of repression in Iraq and Egypt, Libya is entering uncertain and potentially dangerous times, particularly for its religious minorities. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s removal sparked widespread persecution and a mass exodus of Christians. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow has emboldened Muslim extremists to terrorize Coptic Christians.
Guard our freedoms
Jesus and His apostles and countless martyrs through the ages were executed for proclaiming their beliefs. Today, in many parts of the world, Christians are still killed for giving voice to religious conviction.
In 21st-century Canada, people of faith seldom face physical threats but, despite Charter guarantees of religious freedom, they risk being hauled in front of a human rights tribunal if a third party is offended by an expression of faith. In these quasi-courts, an accused person can be censured, fined, forced to apologize and ordered to pay their accuser’s legal fees.
Rally for life
On Oct. 22 a group of hopeful young Christians is holding a rally for people of all ages that deserves widespread attention and support.
The youth wing of Campaign Life Coalition will gather at Queen’s Park in Toronto to urge the provincial government to stop funding abortions with taxpayer money. The target of their protest will be the Ontario government, but the message should resonate with provincial governments nationwide.
Stand up for modesty
Even people who abhor the unrelenting sexualization of Western culture are generally reluctant to speak out on the topic. Who needs the attention? Who wants to be called a prude?
So there is a lesson for all in the simple protest of a Northern Ireland farmer who recently told pop superstar Rihanna to put on a shirt or get off of his land.
“I do not believe young ladies should have to take their clothes off to entertain,” he said. “I’m entitled to hold that opinion.”
Stand up for education
The biggest threat to Catholic education is not creeping secularism, political apathy or stressed government finances. It’s Catholic complacency.
When Catholics take their schools for granted, they lose them.
Fr. Leo English, a Redemptorist from Newfoundland, shared that warning in a recent speech.
“We took what we had for granted,” English told a Saskatoon audience. “This is an all-too common practice. Do not take what you have for granted, because there are storms everywhere.”
Answering the call
For many months the Horn of Africa has been desperate for life-saving rain but, now that rain seems imminent, it is dreaded.
The autumn downpours that may help next year’s harvest will first bring fall flooding, cholera, malaria, typhoid and other disease to tens of thousands of starving people wandering the countryside or crammed into squalid camps. Perhaps the only place on Earth worse than Somalia today will be Somalia tomorrow.
Untold thousands, mainly women and children, have already died in East Africa’s famine and the United Nations is forecasting 13 million perilously underfed people and 750,000 deaths before the grave-digging is done. An urgent UN appeal for $2.5 billion in international aid has been muffled by the noise of European debt problems and the possibility of another world recession. The UN is still $1 billion short of its fund-raising goal.
Jesuits are a key part of our history
Four hundred years ago a pair of brave, but no doubt anxious, French Jesuit missionaries landed at Port Royal in Acadia on the shores of the Bay of Fundy. In 1611 the small fort was a gateway to the vast, unexplored territory called New France.
Over the decades that followed, the Jesuits moved steadily inland and, while fulfilling their mission as evangelists, they also became explorers, cartographers, educators, chroniclers and pastors. More so than any other religious order, the Jesuits not only witnessed the birth of Canada, they shaped significant parts of its history.
To commemorate the 400th anniversary of their arrival to the “New World” and to celebrate their many spiritual and temporal contributions to Canada, The Catholic Register has published this 36-page homage to the Jesuit priests and brothers whose courage brought them to our shores in 1611 and whose faith and commitment to service has entwined them in the fabric of Canadian life to this day.
We originally envisioned this tribute as a 12-page section. But it tripled in size over the summer due to an outpouring of support from the many organizations on these pages that wanted to extend their own congratulations in an advertisement. As a result, when the special section is combined with our weekly 20-page paper, the 56-page Catholic Register you are holding is probably the largest we’ve ever published.
The story of the Jesuit martyrs is an important part of the Canadian education curriculum. Therefore, in addition to being delivered to subscriber homes, an additional 14,000 copies of the Jesuit section have been printed for distribution to more than 1,000 Catholic elementary and high schools in Ontario at the expense of The Register.
This 400-year milestone is worthy of celebration. We hope you enjoy it.
Jim O’Leary
Publisher and Editor
