Bible

This year Lent began with ashes in Northern Ontario, just as it does every year and everywhere. But this year’s ashes up north are a little different because they’re likely the most ecumenical ashes in Canada.

I come like a beggar with a gift in my hand. These are the opening lyrics to a song by Sydney Carter that I learned as part of the Toronto Catholic Worker community many years ago. As we enter the season of Lent and its call to prayer, fasting and almsgiving, I find myself quietly singing it to myself. The song continues, “By the hungry I will feed you, by the poor I’ll make you rich, by the broken I will mend you, tell me which one is which.”

Vancouver -- Mary Wagner’s long road toward achieving legal recognition of the humanity of the unborn has come to an end as the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed her leave to appeal Feb. 18.

Roughly a decade in development, the new Centre for Faith, Reason, Peace and Justice at St. Thomas More College couldn’t be more timely.

CLEVELAND -- Ursuline Sr. Dianna Ortiz was teaching Indigenous children as a missionary in Guatemala in 1989 when her ministry was torn apart in the midst of the country’s brutal civil war.

OTTAWA -- Ontario's government used the newly declared National Human Trafficking Awareness Day Feb. 22 to unveil major new funding and legislation as part of the province’s anti-human trafficking strategy, as governments in Canada continue to take action against what Pope Francis has called “a crime against humanity.”

The Canadian bishops' conference and its international development agency will discontinue funding for 24 partners following the completion of a joint subcommittee’s review of international partner organizations that receive funding from Canadian Catholics.

OTTAWA -- The federal government was granted one more month Thursday to expand access to medical assistance in dying even as its efforts to do so stalled in the House of Commons.

Sean Murphy was a Mountie for 37 years and a local coroner for years after that. Yet even he is astonished at how quickly Canadians have become comfortable with obliging health-care workers to perform medically-assisted homicide.

Canada’s bishops are continuing to study federal legislation that provides legal protections for Indigenous communities in the form of internationally recognized rights.