Readers will indulge me, I trust, if I write again about Msgr. Thomas Joseph Raby, whose funeral was held last week in Kingston. It does not seem excessive to spend another week on his memory.

Only in an age permeated with paradox could the victories of the gay rights movement present a model for religious believers in the public square. Yet whether one agrees or disagrees with what gay activists have achieved over the past 40 years, there is no doubt the strategic course they have followed has been wildly successful and worth emulating as a result.

A month ago Canada’s new ambassador for religious freedom called on Iran to stop persecuting followers of the Baha’i faith, the country’s largest religious minority. Citing Canada as a leading defender of religious freedom, Andrew Bennett urged “the regime in Iran to live up to its human rights obligations and to respect the voices, thoughts and beliefs of all Iranians.”

The other day I had a “Count Your Blessings” type of day. It was courtesy of two friends; a new friend and a long-time friend.

Thomas Joseph Raby — T.J. to his closest friends, always Mgsr. Raby to me — died a few weeks shy of his 95th birthday. Msgr. Raby was born on Oct. 1, and it pleased him that his birthday was the feast of the Little Flower. It is a measure of the length of his years that when Msgr. Raby was born in 1918, St. Therese did not yet have a feast day. She was not beatified until 1923, nor canonized until 1925. Indeed, Msgr. Raby was born during the First World War.

It took the deployment of chemical weapons to fully awaken the world to the war horror that has stalked Syria for 2 1/2 years. Now global leaders must forcefully react, not with missiles, but with an immediate and profound assault on the humanitarian crisis that is destabilizing the region and raining immense suffering on millions of innocent Syrians.

KINGSTON, ONT. - A humble, prayerful and dedicated priest, Msgr. Tom Raby was “the salt of the earth” who influenced countless lives as a pastor and writer, a crowded church heard at his funeral Mass.

Being a Western Canadian who has lived for many years in Quebec, it is more natural for me to want to bury a Trudeau than to praise one.

With the retirement and replacement of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as the Holy See’s secretary of state, a difficult chapter in Vatican governance has come to an end. Over the last few years senior cardinals around the world openly criticized him. A delegation of Pope Benedict XVI’s most trusted cardinals went to see him, begging that he fire Bertone, and news of the meeting became widely known. In the meetings of cardinals before the conclave in March, the dominant theme was how to remedy his maladministration, and that indelicate topic was aired publicly in Bertone’s presence.

There is a time for everything and a time for every affair under the heavens. The author of Ecclesiastes could well have been writing a script for my summer.