Pietro Parolin

As Indigenous elders, youth, knowledge keepers and residential school survivors prepare for their historic meetings with Pope Francis Dec. 17-20, Regina Archbishop Don Bolen is inviting Canadians to journey with them spiritually.

Are we ready for Christ? After almost two years of living through this pandemic, we might feel like we are ready for anything and everything or maybe you are feeling like Charlie Brown just before Lucy pulls the football away.

Omar El Akkad begins his novel, What Strange Paradise, with this sentence: “The child lies on the shore.” That beginning calls to mind the photo of the dead three-year-old refugee Alan Kurdi whose body was washed ashore on a Mediterranean island in September 2015. The photo sparked heightened global concern for Syrian refugees and an upsurge in donations to help migrants and refugees.

At 9 a.m. the line up for the St. Ann’s Church Food Bank in downtown Toronto stretches around the corner and back up to Gerrard Street. At 9:30 they’ve run out of milk and yogurt. At 10 more bags of pre-packed groceries are headed upstairs from the basement to restock tables where food bank patrons pick up their allotment for the week.

Truth exposed

We take pride in our belief that we are a welcoming and inclusive society. If we examine our language deeper we are faced with the truth that we are not. We were not welcoming or inclusive to the people who are here already before we arrived. The phrase “we are a nation of immigrants” exposes the exclusion of the Indigenous people. The phrase summarized why we are in this tender spot. Their being out of our consciousness resulted in their being out of our society.

Life looks pretty promising at dawn. The sun is rising, the air a little crisper, the day ahead of us full of possibilities — a chance to start anew, hope for the best, maybe even fix yesterday’s problems or at least see them in a new light.

VATICAN CITY -- Pope Francis will draw the world’s attention to migration once again as he visits Cyprus and Greece in early December.

VANCOUVER -- When Fr. Francis Galvan left Sacred Heart Church in Delta, B.C., for a priests’ study week in Harrison Hot Springs, he didn’t expect to find himself at the centre of a catastrophic flood as British Columbia found itself facing what is being called the storm of the century.

With all that today’s parents have to do, how is it possible to go about the mammoth task of parenting the media?

The spirit of Christmas giving arrived early this year in Edmonton, with the St. Joseph’s College Catholic Students’ Association at the University of Alberta collecting clothing to keep dozens of homeless people a little warmer this winter.