Early each year bishops from North America and Europe join bishops from the Holy Land on an information tour of those sacred but troubled lands. The visit this January had added significance because 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War and the start of the ongoing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

On a family holiday in London earlier this month, I learned many fascinating stories while wandering the old town, but one involving the last Catholic king of England and his nephew may well have been the most captivating, so to speak.

First came the Year of Mercy, followed by the U.S. election and now the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. It’s as if, in encouraging mercy, Pope Francis anticipated this Trumpian age before any of us saw it coming.

On Tuesday, Jan. 24, the Church marks the feast of St. Francis de Sales, the patron of journalists and the Catholic press. St. Francis was a bishop of Geneva who died in 1622, facts that would seem to remove him far from the hustle and bustle of modern journalism.

While attending an ecumenical service at a Lutheran church in Rome a year ago, Pope Francis encountered a Lutheran woman who was married to a Roman Catholic. She asked the Pope why she could not receive the Eucharist while attending Catholic services with her husband.

Calgary Bishop Fred Henry said he knew it was time to retire when his pain became constant and his posture became stooped to the point that “my feet are much more familiar to me than the sky.”

I have crossed paths with Bishop Frederick Henry for nearly 20 years on visits to my family in Calgary. He has always been kind to me, made me welcome in his diocese and I have enjoyed the occasions we have had time to talk.

Visiting Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change several years ago, I overheard a small black boy ask his mother: “Why were white people so bad to us?”

Montreal was not quite 250 years old when Mark Twain, scanning a skyline of church steeples, called it the city of a hundred bell towers.

Another year over, a new one just begun. For 55 newsroom employees at the Halifax-based Chronicle Herald, almost the entire year was spent on the picket line. A year is a long time to be on strike.