Feature

Cardinal's installation ceremony more streamlined than in the past

February 13, 2012

VATICAN CITY - In part to avoid giving the impression that becoming a cardinal is a sacrament or quasi-sacrament, Pope Benedict XVI will use a revised, streamlined prayer service to create 21 new cardinals Feb. 18. In previous years, the installation ceremony consisted of the consistory on Saturday where the new cardinals received their red hats and the assignment of their titular churches in Rome, followed by a Mass on Sunday where the Pope presented each new cardinal with a ring as “the sign of dignity, pastoral care and the most solid communion with the See of Peter.” This time, the new cardinals will receive their hats, rings and assignments during the Feb. 18 ceremony. They still will celebrate Mass with the Pope the next day. At the beginning of the Mass, the first of the new cardinals — Cardinal-designate Fernando Filoni, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples — will express thanks to the Pope on behalf of the group.

From humble beginnings Collins will rise to cardinal

February 12, 2012

Despite its grand Catholic church at the top of the hill, Guelph, Ont., is a modest place and home to modest people. A little bit of Guelph’s heroic modesty lurks in the tabernacle of Our Lady Immaculate Church up on the hill. Somehow in the 1970s the tabernacle door was damaged such that it no longer locked. It was replaced by a more modern tabernacle that some in the parish thought conflicted with their church’s neogothic architecture. “It was an ugly, monstrous looking thing,” declares John Valeriote, lawyer, amateur historian and stalwart of Guelph’s Catholic community.

Waterloo education director proud of the difference made over 27 years in Catholic schools

February 11, 2012

With almost 15 years as the director of education for Waterloo Region’s Catholic schools, Roger Lawler says he’s seen the difference that Catholic schools make. In fact, he’s a better person for it. “I have seen how an entire school community wraps itself around students and families who are in pain,” Lawler told The Catholic Register.

100,000 welcomes from Ireland's All Hallows

February 5, 2012

A hundred-thousand welcomes is perhaps more students than little All Hallows College could actually accommodate, but that’s the welcome the Irish seminary extends to mature international students. One-hundred-thousand welcomes in the Irish tongue is céad mile fåilte. And the first person to extend that Irish greeting to international students in the Renewal for Life Sabbatical program is a Canadian, Sr. Mary Ann Maxwell.

Historic parish reaches out to Super Bowl visitors

February 3, 2012

INDIANAPOLIS - A historic Indianapolis church is in the centre of festivities surrounding the Feb. 5 Super Bowl XLVI at Lucas Oil Stadium. St. John the Evangelist parish, founded 175 years ago when Indianapolis was a small town on the edge of the American frontier, is the middle of the Super Bowl Village hosting many events at the Indiana Convention Centre across the street from the church and on streets surrounding it.

St. Mike’s made NHL vice president Jim Gregory the man that he became

January 28, 2012

TORONTO - Everything Jim Gregory has in life is a result of his association with Toronto’s St. Michael’s College School, he said. Serving the NHL today as senior vice president of hockey operations, Gregory is one of six alumni being inducted into the Order of St. Michael this year, the highest honour St. Michael’s College School can bestow on a member of its community. “I look up to the people who they have in the Order of St. Michael and never dreamt I’d be considered for it,” said Gregory, 76. “So when I was called, it was an unbelievable surprise.”

Dominicans set bar high on human rights

January 23, 2012

Dominicans have a long history of being rather dissatisfied with this world. But they have never merely complained. Canadian Dominican Father Philippe LeBlanc has complained, but never aimlessly. He pioneered a Dominican presence at the United Nations in Geneva. Beginning in 1996, in partnership with Franciscans International, LeBlanc and a band of Dominicans have been standing up at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights to point out where the world has failed, where power and blind arrogance has injured the poor, where dignity has been forgotten.

Tying together the history of relic worship

January 22, 2012

Charles Freeman offers a history of medieval relic worship that is both intriguing and engaging — but not, in the end, sympathetic to its subject. Freeman ambitiously tackles the long Middle Ages — from the start of relic worship among early Christians to the Renaissance and Reformation, when the cult of saints and the reality of miracles began to be questioned. There are many relics in Holy Bones, Holy Dust, but Freeman finds few saints as he generally disparages the Medieval men and women who wrote about, built around and venerated relics. The author deserves praise for trying to bring together into one story, spanning more than 1,500 years, the complex facets of relic worship from across Europe. Scholars specializing in medieval religion tend, instead, to focus on one area, period or cult.

Cutting-edge science: the church and the study of human anatomy

January 20, 2012

VATICAN CITY - Many readers of the Vatican's official newspaper might have been taken by surprise in mid-January by an article effusively praising a well-known exhibition of "plastinated" human bodies, which was making an extended stop in Rome. "Body Worlds," which L'Osservatore Romano called a "wonderful ode to respect for the body," is an exhibition of preserved human corpses, displayed in often sporty stances.

"Narcissism" cited in double lives some clergy lead

January 19, 2012

OTTAWA - Despite the many cases in recent years of unfaithful priests, an expert on sexual abuse and pornography predicts a future with a “much healthier Church and healthier priests.” Peter Kleponis is a Pennsylvania psychologist who has counselled priests who sexually abused minors as well as men addicted to pornography, his specialty. He says the Church has gone through a painful phase and, although “it’s not over yet,” there is reason for optimism. “There is hope. There is change,” said Kleponis. But, he adds, “there is still more purification and purging that needs to be done.”