There is a new craze, of all things, for adult colouring books. I know much has been written on the infantilization of our culture, the Boomers regressing to their earlier years, trying to find their lost youth, and the Millenials striving mightily to hold on to a youth quickly slipping away. But colouring books? Whatever happened to sketching, drawing, painting, creativity in general? G.K. Chesterton would doodle (quite well, as it turns out) as he wrote (difficult on a laptop, alas), as would his contemporary Hilaire Belloc. Why cannot our modern adults draw and colour? Too much work? I don’t think colouring in-between the lines was what Christ meant when he called for us to be as little children. But who am I to say? Well, I just did.
Most Canadians oppose the quixotic and imprudent attempt to bring over 25,000 Syrian ‘refugees’ by the end of this calendar year, especially after it was discovered that two of the murderers in the Paris attacks apparently had Syrian passports, and had come in under the cloak of ‘refugeeism’, as ISIS had warned they would. All it takes is a few such fanatics to create a whole lot of mayhem, and change things forever. But Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Wynne seem quite literally, as my Mum would say, ‘hell-bent and determined’ on their course of action. I always puzzle over the faux-moral stances of liberal-moral-progressives. Perhaps their soft heart for the refugees is displaced guilt for their hard heart on almost every other, more grave and serious, moral issue?
The Oxford Dictionary’s (the standard for all other dictionaries) ‘word of the year’ is, yes, an ’emoji’, one of those 
symbols that we modern adults (see above) place within our written texts. Is it a word? Well, it is a symbol, and signifies meaning, so perhaps it is. But I would consider it more a doodle, and would rather it were drawn, than just stuck in there from an array of three hundred and one choices of ’emojis’. Alas, our child-like age.
Today is the memorial of the Dedication of the Basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul, two of the four major basilicas in Rome (the others being Saint John Lateran, the Pope’s own cathedral, and Saint Mary Major). So let us pray for the Holy Father, as he continues to guide the Church Universal in the midst of these, as the Chinese proverb has it, ‘interesting times’.