Catechesis

Standing 6-foot-5 and weighing 241 pounds, veteran Ottawa Redblacks defensive lineman Nigel Romick is well-established as one of the most formidable big men and special teams tacklers in the Canadian Football League (CFL).

Maeve Roche will stand vigil for the unborn on Main Street and Broadway Avenue in Hamilton, Ont., for the third straight year starting Sept. 27 and ending Nov. 5.

With the purchase of a new property in 2021 and ambitious plans for development, Canadian Jesuits are hoping to buck the trend of closures and contraction experienced by Quebec Catholic institutions over the past 50 years.

In the pre-dawn hours of yet another tranquil Ottawa morning — Sept. 19 — my cell phone buzzed. With a sense of foreboding and apprehension I speed-read the message that popped up.

A new set of secret documents that the Fraser Health Authority tried but failed to keep from the public confirms that its board of directors overrode advice from its own experts in ordering that euthanasia be offered in all its facilities, including hospices and palliative-care wards.

I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me

1 Corinthians 14: 11

I have lived between languages my whole life and have always been intrigued by their glorious complexity. As a young student of English I grew up academically being told there was one correct grammar, an appropriate accent (which I apparently didn’t have in English or French) and that spelling was locked in stone and correct or incorrect.

There are several themes that emerge from watching the 1 Million Person March 4 Children in Ottawa on Sept. 20. Organized by Kamel El-Cheikh, an Ottawa-based Muslim father, this community was galvanized into action when a teacher in Edmonton criticized a Muslim student who had been absent for Pride activities in June. The audio recording went viral, largely because the teacher’s conclusion was that without agreement on issues of gender and sexuality, the student doesn’t belong in Canada. If that doesn’t galvanize protest, I don’t know what will. And it did.

Delegates at the recent Conservative Party’s National Convention voted to support a ban on treating gender dysphoria in children with pharmaceutical and surgical interventions.

Gender is a nothingburger. I don’t mean that gender is irrelevant, but that “gender” doesn’t have a life of its own. It’s virtually synonymous with “sex.” Because of this fact, I shall from now on render gender as “sex-gender.” Hyphens are fantastic. They keep things together that go together — especially those in danger of separation: “What God has joined together, let no man tear asunder.”

Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, The Splendour of Truth, made a major contribution to moving Catholic moral teaching away from a litany of “do nots” to a call for all to become people of self-giving love. Released 30 years ago, it was criticized for cracking down on wayward theological thinking. However, it was in largest part a response to Vatican II’s desire for moral theology to be rooted in the Gospel. What a novel idea!