The first time I saw someone carrying a poster of an aborted fetus I was driving by a hospital in Toronto. I was stopped in traffic so had a chance to look over at the demonstrators but, at first glance, had no idea exactly what the images were.

Then it hit me. The colour red was the clue. It did not actually look like a fetus or anything human. It was more like the remains of a butcher shop. I shuddered and drove on.

For the past few months in Calgary, a group called Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform has been conducting rolling demonstrations in front of high schools using images of aborted fetuses. They have adopted the tactic of using shocking images as a way to convince people, particularly young people, that abortion is wrong.

“Our philosophy is if someone is old enough to have an abortion, they’re old enough to see the aftermath of an abortion,” said Stephanie Gray, the executive director of the group.

“There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ.”

These words of Pope Benedict XVI have been a driving force behind our efforts as the  Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops completes its new edition of the Roman Missal. A column by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza  in the June 5 issue of The Catholic Register urged the creation of a missal that is “beautiful” and includes full-colour images. As the new missal nears completion, I want to assure Canadian Catholics that I have been truly moved by the beauty of the printer’s craft, by the attention to every detail in font and colour selections, by inspired page designs, by the talents of proofreaders, and by a concern for readability and avoiding odd page turns. Bishops have been involved in every stage of this process, ensuring that the new missal will reflect the preferences of clergy from across the country  and of the CCCB.

But all of this pales in comparison to the encounter with the Gospel. There is nothing more beautiful than the contents of the antiphons and prayers. The instructions we received from the Vatican made it clear: illustrative art in the missal needs to be in service of the liturgy. The words of Jesus at the Last Supper, the quotes from the Psalms and the allusions to the Scriptures: these are the stars of the book, not an abundance of colour plates.

On Father’s Day, many Catholics take time to say a kind word to priests – their spiritual fathers. Might I suggest that this Father’s Day, a special word of gratitude be extended to those priests from foreign countries – India, Poland, Philippines, India, Nigeria and other nations – who are working in Canadian parishes, hospitals, prisons and universities? To extend the familial metaphor, they have become fathers to Canadian Catholics left orphaned by our own lack of priestly vocations.

It’s hard to overstate the catastrophic decline in priestly vocations. A senior Holy See diplomat, intimately familiar with the Canadian situation, once reported a devastating statistic: In one recent year there were more bishops in Canada than there were seminarians.

“A Church where there are as many bishops as seminarians is dead,” he told me. By that standard, if not dead, the Church in Canada is at least in intensive care.

For Canada’s First Nations people, last week’s auditor-general’s report must evoke deja vu.

In her farewell report to Parliament, outgoing auditor-general Sheila Fraser took the government to task for repeated and ongoing failure to address numerous barriers preventing First Nations people from sharing in Canada’s prosperity. It is Canada’s shame that so many native people live without such basic needs as a warm home and safe water.

The auditor general itemized what previous reports had said about the failure of successive governments to improve living standards on native reserves. Yet these observations barely made the news. The headlines went to the splashier findings about outrageous expenditures from last year’s G8/G20 summits and, in particular, excessive spending in the Parry Sound-Muskoka riding of Conservative cabinet minister Tony Clement.

As the new Treasury Board president, Clement is expected to introduce spending efficiency to a cash-strapped government. Today, that seems a bit rich. Clement was rebuked by the auditor general for blowing some $45 million tax dollars in his  riding, using funds approved for border security on local projects without proper oversight or an appropriate paper trail. While he was authorizing gazebos and other projects in Ontario’s cottage country, First Nations people were living in mould-infested homes, boiling drinking water to avoid disease and sending children to ramshackle schools.

It was about two months ago that I wrote about the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (D&P), and the serious questions about its pro-life commitment. It was just after Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, S.J., of Ottawa had cancelled the speaking tour of a D&P partner organization in Mexico which collaborated with groups promoting abortion rights. Since then the most frequent question I have been asked by pastors is: What should we do about raising money for D&P?

My view is that D&P has a tenuous claim on Catholic dollars because, aside from fundraising in Catholic parishes, they have a tenuous relationship with any distinctively Catholic mission. In their operations they are largely — and by their own proud design — indistinguishable from any number of peace and justice NGOs working in the developing world.

Developments since April have underscored how weak their Catholic identity really is. The controversy in Mexico centred on D&P’s relationship with the  Centro PRODH. As reported in these pages this week, the archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, wrote to the Canadian bishops saying that the Centro PRODH supports “activities that are an affront to Christian values.”

The next time you’re faced with an overwhelming home renovation, consider this: collectively, the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches own 3,000 buildings in the province that require a combined $30 million to operate annually. Another $30 million is spent on maintaining “historic properties.” That’s a lot of shingles.

Before there were town halls or schools, arenas or the local Tim Horton’s, parishes were the spiritual and community hubs of society, bringing people together to strengthen the neighbourhood. Over the years though, the role of the parish as community centre has changed, and so have the neighbourhoods they serve.

While many historic churches continue to thrive, others, sadly, are facing significant challenges, with little or no funds to maintain their facilities, often due to dwindling congregations. While desirable, maintaining all of these churches is just not feasible.   

A “heritage designation” from various municipal governments has been applied to about 12 per cent of the 3,000 churches in Ontario.

Designated churches require permission from their municipality to change in any way the parts of the building that are considered culturally significant, often including pews, windows, altars and other parts of the building used for worship. So if the bishops, priests and laity agree it makes sense to renovate or (as a last resort) demolish a church that is no longer viable, they don’t have a legal right to implement that option.

An exhaustive American study has attempted to answer the imponderable: what caused so many priests to sexually abuse minors over the second half of the 20th century?

The authors of the report, from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of New York, spent five years sifting through thousands of pages of data, interviews and surveys from victims, priests and bishops. Their work, commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is described as the most complete  examination of clergy abuse ever.

They found that abuse increased throughout the 1960s, peaked in the 1970s and then drastically declined around the mid-1980s. No single cause was identified but it found a host of social and institutional factors that may explain the sudden spike and just-as-sudden fall. The most controversial of these is that clergy abuse was sparked by a broader decline in society’s moral behaviour typified by the sex and drugs revolution of the 1960s.

Canada’s Supreme Court has been asked to adjudicate whether religious freedom means the freedom to actually say something is really true that you believe to be really true.

It’s true. We’re that far gone. We’re that far down the path toward a state of total social incoherence. We are at the point where it takes the top jurists in the land, and a small army of lawyers, to decide whether what is staring us in the face is also right in front of our noses.

The case in question is Catholic parents in Quebec who objected to the provincial education ministry imposing a mandatory ethics and religion program on all schools, public and private.

At the surface level, the program is dishwater comparative religion. People who go to synagogue believe this. People who go to Catholic Mass believe that. People who go to mosque believe something else again. We’d like to teach the world to sing in neutral harmony.

The case of a punk rock band giving back its government grant following a public outcry shines light again on the world of government funding for the arts and revives the issue of where to draw the line.

Vancouver’s Living with Lions recently released an album called Holy S**t, complete with graphics that included a resurrection figure appearing to be created from excrement. Before the album was recalled, the last line of the band’s acknowledgements read, “We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage,” the standard acknowledgement for all organizations receiving Heritage funding, and not something taxpayers expect to see on such vulgar packaging.

Through Canadian Heritage, our taxes fund all kinds of projects, many of them beneficial or at least non-controversial. In this case, funds were directed through the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR), which provides loans and grants to promote and foster Canadian talent. In its statement about the Living with Lions CD, FACTOR noted that “the record in question was packaged with graphics and liner notes that some may consider offensive. This material had not been submitted to FACTOR prior to its release. We have communicated to the record label that there has been a negative reaction from some members of the public regarding the content.”

Canadian parishes will begin preparing soon for the new translation of the Mass, to be implemented in Advent 2011. Yet one decision needs to be made sooner; parishes must order their copies of the new Roman Missal (the book of prayers for Mass used at the altar).

The missal must be beautiful. Anything that is not beautiful should never be on the altar. Our supreme worship of the Lord requires beauty. We too require beauty — which is why we dress up for important functions, decorate our homes by the season and use beautiful things for special occasions. Mercifully, the age of ugly vessels upon the altar is largely passed, and increasingly one sees beautiful vestments, church decor and architecture.

Most people never see the missal. Yet the priest who offers Mass and the servers who assist him need to be constantly reminded that what they are doing is not routine. The long tradition of missals that were themselves works of art was aimed at assisting the priest to be mindful of just that.