At Advent I’m flooded with memories of childhood and growing up in a devout Polish immigrant home. My family’s life revolved around Toronto’s St. Stanislaus Kostka Church at Queen and Bathurst. I would be there several times a week for catechism classes, Polish school, youth group, Polish folk dancing, my dad’s choir practice, mom’s Legion of Mary.

During Advent there were church rehearsals for the parish Nativity play, one of the biggest Sunday afternoons of the year when we’d await the spectacular visit from St. Nicolas. Dressed like a bishop, he brought goodies for all the kids.

My mother died on Nov. 13, age 99, just a few weeks short of her hundredth birthday. She had lived a long, productive life, including careers as medical secretary, teacher, librarian and homemaker. Her last three years were spent in a nursing home where, by the way, she received good care.

As the surly manifestations of age and decrepitude became more prevalent, she was oftimes spiteful and angry, but when death came it was quite peaceful. So, after a long life and calm death, who could ask for more. Certainly not me. G.K. Chesterton cautioned against looking a gift universe in the mouth, and I have always thought that sage advice.

BALTIMORE - Last week the bishops of the United States gathered in their premier diocese and protested the erosion of the founding liberties of the American republic. In their annual plenary meeting the bishops designated threats to religious liberty as a key pastoral concern. The American bishops are right to be alarmed, but not only them. Religious liberty is under threat all over the world.

The most grievous attacks are lethal, with Christians being killed for their faith in Egypt, Iraq and India, just to mention the sites of massacres in the last year. Then there is the routine and brutal persecution of Christians in communist states, like China, or Islamist ones, like Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the vast majority of acts of religious persecution around the world are against Christians.

Bills introduced from the backbenches of Parliament are typically cast adrift unless the government opts to throw them a life preserver. So we applaud Justice Minister Rob Nicholson for tossing a lifeline to a private member’s bill that seeks repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Section 13 comprises the paragraphs of an otherwise worthwhile act that makes hate speech a punishable offence. Hateful language, however transmitted, is abhorrent and society has an obligation to combat it robustly. But Section 13, which evolved from legislation in the 1960s to silence racist telephone hotlines, is manifestly flawed and its repeal is long overdue.

The tragic child sex abuse scandal at Penn State opens many wounds for Catholics.

During the first seven-10 days after the story broke, almost every media report compared the scandal to abuse that has rocked the Catholic Church over past decades. The comparisons have not totally abated, either.

“Like the Roman Catholic Church, Penn State is an arrogant institution hiding behind its mystique,” declared the National Post on Nov. 14.

There really is such a thing as the sound of a jaw dropping. And you can hear it over the phone.

“Dorothy, you’re home? You are not in Spain? I just wired you $500!”

That’s when my friend’s jaw dropped, and I got an instant pain in my stomach. Earlier that morning I learned that hackers had invaded one of my e-mail accounts. A professional ring of scammers, pretending to be me, told everyone in my address book I had been burglarized and left stranded at the embassy in Valencia. And I was desperate for financial help.

Armed with the extraordinary social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, I recently made a deputation to a City of Toronto committee examining contracting out work currently being done by unionized cleaning staff.

As a concerned citizen, father, grandfather and former educator who has taught social ethics to thousands, I am appalled at the attack on the workers’ rights to earn a living wage. But, sadly, this is not an isolated case involving one group of low-paid cleaners. There is a trend evident across many levels of public life and private enterprise to squeeze wages from working families.

The Vatican is accustomed to accounts of miraculous recovery. But it didn’t take a miracle for Sharon Porter to captivate a recent gathering of cardinals, scientists, theologians and philosophers. Her story is not miraculous, just remarkable.

Porter suffers from systemic scleroderma, a dreadful auto-immune disease that causes hardening of the skin and internal organs, mobility problems and severe pain. There is no cure. But three years ago Porter’s own adult stem cells were used to rebuild her immune system and today she is virtually symptom free.

Why this matters in the Vatican is that, through the Pontifical Council for Culture, it recently signed a five-year, $1-million initiative with NeoStem, Inc., an American specialist in stem-cell research. Like the Church, NeoStem believes it is immoral — and unnecessary — to obtain stem cells by destroying embryos. It has aligned with the Church to promote adult stem cell research that is effective and ethical.

The death of Bil Keane, cartoonist and evangelist of culture, was a reminder that even the former can be an instrument of the latter.

Keane, who died on Nov. 8 at the age of 89, drew the Family Circus cartoon for more than 50 years. It launched in 1960 — during a leap year on Feb. 29 — and is still being published. The one-panel comic was in the form of a circle, and Keane had originally called it the Family Circle. A popular magazine of the same name objected and so Keane changed it to Family Circus, the protest from the eponymous periodical proving serendipitous, for the antics of Daddy, Mommy, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy and PJ were often circus-like.

So our long slide down the slope of civilized savagery proceeds.

Agence France Press reports the first public case of a Dutch patient euthanized even though she had never formally requested death or followed the required legal protocols.

The woman, identified only as being 64 years old and from the south of Holland, was reportedly killed illegally in a hospital last March. The medical board that approves each act of euthanasia in Holland knew she had never formally asked to have her life ended. It also found she was far too cognitively diminished by Alzheimer’s to make a rational choice in her fate.