Two years ago the demands of office caused a tired Pope Benedict XVI to resign the papacy. He was 85. Now we have Pope Francis, 78, musing about a short pontificate as he begins his third year on the job.

I had the pleasure this past week of hosting George Weigel, one of the Church’s leading public intellectuals, in Toronto and Kingston. I had long wanted to host Weigel, a mentor and friend and colleague for more than 20 years, and thought that 2015, the 10th anniversary of the death of St. John Paul II, would be the perfect year to do it.

Lent has a way of unsettling us, of shaking up our easy routines and making us question what more we should be doing as part of our Christian obedience.

The release last month of the Ontario government’s revised physical education and health curriculum is an opportunity for Catholic schools to again demonstrate an approach that is both distinctive from but supportive of secular goals.  

A country that deems it progressive to kill your grandmother but conservative for the state to dictate your choice of hat might be going, in a technical sense, nuts.

Requiring doctors to remain pillars of integrity while chipping at their moral underpinning is an odious contradiction. Yet that is what the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario proposes with a draconian new policy that tramples on conscience and religious rights.

Basketball superstar LeBron James and the National Basketball Association have joined best-selling author Sheryl Sandberg in promoting gender equality, the timing coinciding with International Women’s Day on March 8.

I have been staunchly against the death penalty since I started visiting the now-defunct Kingston Penitentiary as an undergraduate, meeting weekly with a group of prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment.

A harsh ruling by a Quebec judge against a hijab-wearing Muslim woman offers a cautionary tale about what can happen when a peaceable society falls sway to fear and suspicion.

A friend who attended a commemoration Mass at a church in Montreal’s Villeray neighbourhood at the end of February e-mailed me this compelling observation shortly afterward.