World hungers for ‘rock star’ Pope’s leadership
Pope Francis’ trip to the United States next week, including speeches to Congress and the United Nations General Assembly, will almost certainly put a spotlight on how the leader of the Catholic Church proposes to solve the global problems challenging human security in the world today.
Stamp of mercy
In 1741 Pope Benedict XIV was concerned that some bishops were dissolving marriages too freely so he established stringent protocols to govern annulments. Those canon laws remained virtually unchanged through 18 papacies until now, 274 years later, when they are being rewritten by a Pope who is affixing his stamp of mercy on a process that is often long, expensive and painful.
Eyes wide open
Pictures of a dead three-year-old Syrian child washed ashore in Turkey made the world weep, but will little Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body move world populations and their governments to act?
Compassion first
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has boldly urged the European Union to respond immediately and compassionately to the region’s largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.
It would do us well to ‘look higher’
Conservation International has sponsored a series of videos that have become YouTube sensations. They feature famous actors — Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford and others — voicing different aspects of the natural world, from the ocean, to the rain forest, to redwood trees. The most striking is the one that presents Mother Nature herself, given voice by Julia Roberts.
Appalling silence
Ontario and several other provinces are following the federal government’s lead in assembling “expert” panels to research and make recommendations during a mad dash to transform Canada into a nation that permits doctors to kill selected patients or help these patients kill themselves.
Jim’s death diminishes me, but also gives me strength
Some weeks ago, I mentioned an inevitable goodbye that would take place with a dear friend whom I met on the first day of Grade 9 at Neil McNeil High School in Toronto’s east end 40 years ago next week.
- By Robert Brehl
Future is in our hands
In the early 1940s, as a barefoot-in-summer lad in Ireland, I had my introduction to the natural environment. My family had a small store and pub on a gravel coast road in The Burren, a barren karst limestone district on Galway Bay.
My father had built a small windmill, using the dynamo from a Ford car, with a wooden wind direction indicator, on an eight-metre pole. The constant winds from the ocean kept three “wet” batteries charged, which provided enough electricity for four light bulbs and a wireless radio. Every night, my father and the neighbours from miles around gathered around the wireless to listen to the news/propaganda from the war fronts.
Philip Neri’s heritage of joy
WOLFE ISLAND, Ont. - One of the highlights of my summer is “Seminarian Week” on Wolfe Island.
A time to meddle
An understandable reaction to an early August federal election call for an Oct. 19 vote is to declare a pox on all their houses and turn deaf ears to such an excruciatingly long campaign. Eleven weeks of insincere promises and attack ads. Who needs their summer sun darkened by those black clouds?
Politicians trump people
Green Party leader Elizabeth May made the perceptive point recently that democracy is too important to be left only to politicians. A nuance that might be added is that as a keystone of democracy, free, fair and above all vigorous elections should never become the exclusive preserve of the political actors seeking to benefit from them.