Making saints is the entirety of the Church’s mission. How official saints get “made” - or better recognized - in the life of the Church is thus of supreme importance.
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If Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro was not the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, his recent attack on the “ecumenism of hate” he diagnoses in the United States never would have been published in that venerable journal.
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Trump was full of praise for Poland’s two centuries of courage and fidelity on the front lines of freedom. Very specifically, he identified the key date in recent Polish history as the day that St. John Paul II returned home for the first time:
Read MoreTrump lacks credibility on lived values. Yet he delivered a powerful argument that Western civilization — rooted in certain ideas about God, the human person and liberty — depends upon more than force of arms or a surfeit of material goods to survive.
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It’s possible to be banal in either language. The government had erected an enormous multi-storey billboard behind the building soon-to-be-known-as-the-building-formerly-known-as-the-Langevin-Block. The message the government chose to inspire Canadians? Building on our past for tomorrow.
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President Donald Trump was full of praise for Poland’s noble past on Thursday in Warsaw, but his presence here ahead of the G20 in Hamburg, Germany, is an attempt to shape a different European future, where the eastern countries have a larger role.
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St. John Paul’s longtime papal spokesman offered a most extraordinary — and successful — service, one that has lessons for today.
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The sexual abuse charges against Cardinal George Pell by the Victoria police are a test for Australian criminal justice, the Australian Church and for the cardinal himself
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Tolerance for religious minorities was written into the very establishment of Canada, more than a century before the country was established in 1867. Today, religious liberty and religious pluralism are under siege the world over. The 150 years – and more – of the Canadian experience have much to offer.
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Coast to coast. It is a defining element of Canada, the sheer vastness of a land mass that extends, extends, extends to the horizon and beyond, finding an end in the only thing more vast than the land itself — the sea.
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Over seven days of formation and fellowship at a new seminar on Wolfe Island, thirteen young Catholics inspired me by their commitment to witness to the transcendent dignity and destiny of the human person in every sphere of society.
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Newfoundland is so fittingly Canadian, it is hard to imagine it was ever otherwise: the sea, the coast, the north, the indigenous people and the first European explorers, the closeness to Europe and the opening to a new continent. And the moose.
Read MoreThe visit two weeks ago to Rome of the leading bishops of Venezuela may well have been unprecedented, a highly public visit aimed at, apparently, clarifying that the pope was on their side, and not that of Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro.
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In this year of looking back, many on both sides of the Atlantic might think that there is nothing of great religious significance in the 150th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, to be marked on July 1, 2017.
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The death on May 31 of Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, patriarch emeritus of Kyiv, former head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), resonated in Canada where, outside of Ukraine, the largest Ukrainian Catholic community is found.
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The recent death of Cardinal Husar of Kiev, and the forthcoming beatification of the first Lithuanian martyr of the Soviet era, remind us of one of the most noble periods in Church history: the great lions of the East, the bishops who were heroic witnesses and pastors under totalitarian persecution.
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Truth-telling about history, acknowledging both lights and shadows, is always a challenge. Two temptations have to be resisted
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Three weeks ago, Justin Trudeau knelt in the Sistine Chapel before The Last Judgement, Michelangelo’s depiction of the Risen Christ returning in awesome glory to render final judgement upon the saints and the damned.
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