Feature

For generations, Sr. Celeste is connection to the Church

August 14, 2011

TULITA, N.W.T. - When Sr. Celeste Goulet was nine years old her dad died. She grew up a fat, lonely kid in Guelph, Ont., who was paradoxically good at sports. Badminton was her game. When she was first attracted to religious life, Goulet went looking for an order that ran an orphanage. By the 1970s there weren’t many of those left. Some mostly Polish Franciscans, the Felician Sisters, were the last women’s order in North America that still owned an orphanage. By the time Goulet arrived in Tulita 32 years ago, the young sister had a degree in early childhood education and a conviction that what happens to children matters. She spent a year talking over options with Tulita parents — do you want a day care or a pre-school? She carefully explained the difference. The parents opted for education that would increase their children’s chances of success in school.

Sr. Tromblay tries to bridge Tuktoyaktuk’s rich-poor divide

August 14, 2011

TUKTOYAKTUK, N.W.T. - Kedra and Destiny Kimiksana got to try cherries for the first time at the Catholic mission house in Tuktoyaktuk with Sr. Fay Tromblay. Once they had been warned about the pits, I tried teaching them “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor...” Of course the seven- and eight-year-old girls didn’t know what a tinker or a tailor was. In fact, beggar man and thief were also new vocabulary. After a couple of tentative bites and discovery of the first pit, both girls decided cherries were pretty good. They also got to try a bit of avocado, which Tromblay added to their salad. Salad is something they only eat at Sister’s house. They liked the avocado, but found it difficult to pronounce. Kids in Tuktoyaktuk are familiar with traditional Inuvialuit foods. They love tingmiaq (goose), pipsi (dried fish) and muktuk (skin and blubber of a whale). They eat a lot of imiraq (soup made from caribou, goose or fish).

Youth in search of hope in Tulita

August 14, 2011

TULITA, N.W.T. - On the edge of turning 22, Chad Bonnatrouge doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, hasn’t touched drugs, lives with his grandparents and sticks to himself. He graduated from high school in Tulita a couple of years ago and is uncertain what his next move should be. He’s got family in Vancouver and they have invited him to join them. He’s been there once and is unsure whether he wants to go back. For now he stacks firewood and fetches groceries for his grandparents. He volunteers for the Tulita Land and Financial Corporation. The volunteer hours qualify him for payments from the corporation, which administers funds from the 1994 Sahtu Dene and Metis Land Claim Agreement. Sr. Celeste Goulet remembers how at his graduation ceremony the whole village roared in approval when Bonnatrouge’s name was called. Graduation for this quiet, lonely kid was perhaps not a sure thing.

Re-examining a 400-year relationship

August 13, 2011

TULITA, N.W.T. - Felicia Bravard and her friends Brendan, Stacy and a girl too shy to give her name to a stranger are passing a summer day in classic teenage style. I found them moseying the gravel roads of Tulita sharing a joint at 10 in the morning. They offered me a toke, an offer not often made to middle-aged Church journalists. I declined. If Felicia was a third-generation Canadian with an Italian or Irish background, this would probably fall into the category of teenage misbehaviour — a phase. In a First Nations community in the North, where nearly every adult is either an active alcoholic or counting the weeks, months or years of their sobriety, the 10 a.m. marijuana is more troubling. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is in fact trying to shape a different future for Felicia and her friends. The commission is in the midst of a five-year mandate to create a public record of the tragedy of Indian residential schools and to examine the ongoing fallout of a 130-year policy that separated 150,000 native children from their families. By witnessing the stories of many of the 80,000 survivors and documenting the cultural and societal devastation to families torn apart, the TRC hopes to cultivate reconciliation between aboriginal people and the rest of Canada. Over time, they hope to build a better life for teenagers like Felicia.

50 years of Jesuit joy for Prendergast

July 31, 2011

OTTAWA - When Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast left Montreal for Toronto on Aug. 13, 1961 to begin his novitiate in the Society of Jesus, he admitted shedding some tears aboard the overnight train. “I think it was just leaving my parents and my friends,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be back for some time.” But he awoke the next morning to a new adventure and a sense of joy that has accompanied him, with a few exceptions, ever since.His life as a Jesuit has taken him from Toronto to Montreal, on to Halifax, Regina and Ottawa with sabbaticals in Rome and Jerusalem. A Scripture scholar, he has moved from teaching high school students to teaching university students and seminarians in Toronto, Halifax and Regina, and to teaching the faithful at large in the episcopacy, first in Toronto as an auxiliary bishop, then to Halifax and Ottawa as archbishop. “My life has been very happy,” he said. “Even with a few crisis places, basically it’s been happiness every day.”

The Church stands on the picket line

July 1, 2011

Unions, strikes and lockouts have dominated headlines and preoccupied the government as Canada eases into summer. So how many sermons are being preached about the right of workers to unionize? How often do Catholics recall the teaching of successive popes that workers have a right to a just wage that will provide for their families and old age? Windsor and District Labour Council chaplain Fr. Bill Capitano — Fr. Cap down at the union hall — is convinced those sermons need to be preached. “You might lose some people, but I think you would gain more,” Capitano told The Catholic Register. “The Church is talking about decent, living wages and the right to unionize. Maybe I’m dreaming, but I think that would be good for the Church.” Beginning with the Canadian Auto Workers’ brief strike against Air Canada in mid-June, the Conservative government has taken an aggressive stance against strikes which Labour Minister Lisa Raitt said threaten the economy. The CAW and Air Canada decided to arbitrate their pension dispute before back-to-work legislation could take effect. Legislation imposed on Canada Post and its locked-out workers has saddled workers with lower pay raises than the employer had initially proposed in bargaining. Meanwhile, the Public Service Alliance of Canada is predicting a bitter fight over government plans for job cuts.

Linda Gibbons unrepentant for challenging abortion

June 29, 2011

TORONTO - Long-time pro-life activist Linda Gibbons called for Canadians to stand up against abortion and protest the curtailing of pro-lifers’ freedom of expression on abortion at the June 25 Toronto Pro-life Forum hosted by Campaign Life Coalition. Gibbons said a “critical indignation” was needed to protest Canada’s abortion laws that are “promoting crimes against humanity.” She also slammed the 1994 Ontario Supreme Court injunction barring pro-life activists from picketing, sidewalk counselling and interfering with access to abortion services or the “economic interests” of downtown Toronto clinics, a law that has led to her being arrested 20 times and imprisoned for 10 of the past 17 years. “They are interfering with my freedom and I am offended by that,” she told the crowd of 185 participants at the Hotel Novotel who attended the two-day conference. “In a free society, freedom of speech is a critical element. Why are we arrested for words when acts of murder are committed there?”

Men and women parent differently: sociologist

June 22, 2011

OTTAWA - Children yearn to have a close relationship with their biological parents and they thrive when they are raised by their own mom and dad, an American sociologist told a family conference. Contrary to popular belief, the gender of parents is relevant to a child’s outcomes in life, he said. “Everything I have to say would have been common sense to my grandma,” Brad Wilcox from the University of Virginia told the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada annual conference. “Now we have elaborate social science to prove grandma was right.” Wilcox, a marriage and cohabitation researcher, said children do best when both parents participate in child rearing. He describes that as a counter-cultural and sometimes controversial statement in a society that endorses several different parenting models.

Fathers are guardians of the family and Church

June 22, 2011

TORONTO - Lukasz Petrykowski is a Catholic apologist and lawyer who worries about the type of world his two boys will face when someday they become husbands and fathers. Being a dad in the 21st century is like fighting a cultural battle against the gradual feminization of men in society, he says. He believes fatherhood is at a crossroads that threatens families as we know them today. Petrykowski calls this a crisis of fatherhood. It stems from a gender debate about whether gender is merely “social construction” or is a God-given biological reality. Radical, feminist thinking suggests it is the former, a notion Petrykowski refutes. He doesn’t subscribe to what he calls the “metrosexual myth.” The so-called metrosexual man is concerned with fashion and appearance, and incorporates a feminine nature to his masculinity which can include wearing makeup, nail polish and other beauty adornments previously only seen on women. Petrykowski and other Catholic dads say a way to address this crisis is through their Catholic faith and by holding steadfast to the traditional notion of fathers and husbands as guardians of the family and the Church.

Cultural changes are undermining marriage

June 22, 2011

OTTAWA - Cultural changes in recent decades have caused marriage and fertility rates to plummet, according to an American professor. University of Texas at Austin professor Mark Regnerus told the recent Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) conference that young people are told “there’s no rush,” and that one must “be your own person” before marrying. As a result, marriage rates have dropped in all age groups, but precipitously in the younger age groups. The percentage of men aged 20-24 who have never married “has just exploded” since 1970 when only 35 per cent of men in that age group had never married. Now almost 89 per cent have not married. The next age group, 25-29, has also jumped from 10.5 per cent never married in 1970 to 62 per cent. Among men who marry under the age of 24, religion is “most important” to 44.7 per cent and “very important” to 25.1 per cent, he said. Fidelity and monogamy are also rated highly. Regnerus noted the ages of 20-29 are years of peak fertility for women.