Taking Pride in True Friendship

As Canadians celebrate 'Gay Pride' across this fair dominion, I thought a bit of clarity on what it really is we are being asked...

Virtue and Vice, and Not Everything Nice

Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will. (Saint Thomas Aquinas) What does it mean to be ‘virtuous’? There is...

Lines in the Sand

I’m glad to read this morning that there are still limits to our societal insanity, with the intended forced abortion of a Nigerian woman...

The Persistence of China’s Underground Church

On this solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul – and a blessed one to all our readers - it is good to know that...

Canada’s Dominion Day

A blessed Dominion Day to all our readers, on which we celebrate the official founding of ‘Canada’ as a (mostly) independent part of the...

Cool Heads and Heat Waves

We should all feel some empathy at the drowning of the father and his 23-month daughter in the Rio Grande. I have not for...

The God of Abraham, Sodom and Canada

Abraham’s dialogue with God in yesterday’s Sunday reading still speaks to us four millennia onwards. Indeed, the principle is timeless, that God’s justice –...

The Patronage of Saints

When the Church canonizes some of her faithful as ‘saints’, she is declaring that they lived a Christian life more perfectly, practising charity in...

Barnabites, Civil Wars and Confusing Synods

Saint Anthony Zaccaria (+1539), from noble lineage in late-renaissance Italy, first studied medicine, then for the priesthood, adopting a life of great discipline and...

Louis and Zelie Martin’s Ecclesia Domestica

There is no strict formula to being the parents of saints, but there are things one can do to ameliorate the process, as I...