The great Canadian author William Kinsella died Sept. 16 at the age of 81. He wrote terrific stories and was brilliant at merging baseball and fiction. His novel Shoeless Joe was turned into the hit movie Field of Dreams. He left behind a great literary legacy and a gaping hole in the hearts of baseball fans with a literary bent.

When he received an unexpected call in June and learned Pope Francis planned to make him a bishop, Fr. Robert Kasun figured someone had made a big mistake. Those doubts endured right up to his Sept. 12 ordination in Edmonton.

This week Toronto hosts the head of the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC). Within the UGCC, Shevchuk is referred to as the Patriarch of Kyiv, the common title for the head of an Eastern Catholic Church. Due to tensions with the Orthodox though, especially in Russia, the Holy See grants him the title of “major archbishop,” equivalent in all aspects to a patriarch.

Renowned 19th-century novelist Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote that “mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.”

Each year, there are more than 5,000 heart transplants around the world — that’s about 14 every single day.

As traumatized civilians in war-torn Syria face little near-term hope of returning to their homes, Canada’s refugee resettlement program is running on low battery and needs to be re-charged.

When Canada legalized assisted suicide earlier this year, the National Post’s coolly analytical Andrew Coyne wondered in a column whether we haven’t lost our way as a country. Barely two months after the legislation’s passage, a marker of how lost we are shows up in our insistence on going both ways at once.

When discussions about Catholic fiction arise certain names are always mentioned: J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton and so forth. Even C. S. Lewis comes up, even though he was a member of the Church of England.

Fall temperatures will empty beaches in southern France and bring a natural end to the burkini furor and ugly confrontations that have triggered a worldwide debate. But the underlying tension won’t be folded away with the beach blankets. And that is unsettling.

Only a handful of Catholics are quoted more often than Mother Teresa. Even today, 19 years after her death, the words of the saintly sister still resonate whenever the topic is mercy and compassion.