As war and conflict rage during a prolonged pandemic, Christians prepare to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus who offered peace as a parting gift to His disciples. 

On March 20, 2022, Archbishop Christian Lépine celebrated a Thanksgiving Mass to mark the 10th anniversary of his appointment as Archbishop of Montreal.

Since the legalization of euthanasia in Canada in 2016, I’ve had two people tell me of their parent who would be dying in this way. These were acquaintances who did not know me well, not even my last name, and yet they shared this deeply personal information. Yet in my entire life, I’ve never had even one woman mention in passing that she had an abortion. I’ve never had anyone casually tell me they accompanied someone to an abortion.

I recently read an article reporting the reduced incidence of live births of Down syndrome across multiple European countries, attributed to increased pre-natal screening. My youngest son was born with Down syndrome in 2015, so you may imagine this kind of statistic is difficult for someone like me to learn about.

In a year when we often feel beaten down, Catholic education has something to celebrate, and it should. This year will see the completion of the grade school religion program, Growing in Faith, Growing in Christ, Grades 1 to 8. In 2023, the first kindergarten program will be published, followed by entry into secondary school with the first Grade 9 Religion program in 2024.

Entering the season of Lent can seem like a blessed relief. The harsh mark of ash on the forehead, the stark words of truth, “you are dust,” the stripping away of the distractions and pleasures of our earthly life to stare our mortality square in the face — all these can be received with a bracing joy.

In late February, an Ontario Superior Court ruled in the case of divorced parents who did not agree about vaccination for their two youngest kids, age 10 and 12. The facts in brief: a man and a woman separate after seven years of marriage. They have three kids and remain in the family court system some seven years later. The eldest lives with the father and is vaccinated. The younger two live with the mother and are unvaccinated. The father wants them to be vaccinated; the mother is hesitant.

It can be a cruel, cruel world. The stories from Ukraine, at times either heart-breaking or heart-lifting, are testament to that.

It may seem to us that just a few weeks ago we were celebrating the Christmas season — the season of joy. Yet, in the midst of an unusually cold winter and with snow still on our parishes’ parking lots, our journey of faith brings us to the season of Lent — a season of reflection.

It has become fashionable in certain Roman Catholic circles to attack critical race theory as if it were an all-encompassing ideology that threatens to destroy the Church, the university and the whole of society. These attacks risk plunging the Church into a divisive culture war instead of inviting us to reflect on racism as a form of social evil that Pope John Paul II called “structures of sin.”