The national disgrace of a priest in his 80s waiting years for pointless criminal charges to be abruptly dropped can be mitigated if a constitutional challenge overturns the law that caused the scandal.

It would be most welcome if Ontario’s Catholic bishops could quickly find a way to collectively call on belligerents in the Conservative cabinet and the Canadian Union of Public Employees to come to their senses.

The adage holds that when supping with the Devil, it’s best to use a long spoon. Current Vatican politics and diplomacy seems to have spun it into Oliver Twist’s: “Please, sir, I want some more.”

While creating the generation that came to life from 1946 to 1964, Canadians were in the midst of the Baby Boom.

Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny deployed a recent lecture in Chicago to drive home the vital point that “pro-life” commitment does not — must not — be limited to opinion and activism around abortion and euthanasia.

Last winter, Quebec Catholics knelt on ice in Arctic weather to celebrate Mass outdoors after the provincial government sealed church entrances without warning.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops got a hot scolding last week from the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec for what the FPJQ called a “deplorable” decision to bar journalists from this week’s plenary meetings.

The commonplace complaint that the Church exists in a post-Christian society tends to misplace the common sense fact that the Church emerged from, and transformed, pre-Christian society.

This week, our magazine Penance and Progress that commemorates and explores Pope Francis’ penitential pilgrimage to Canada is off the press.

Whatever else the Holy Father’s summer visit to Canada produced, hard data show he created fertile ground on which the process of Indigenous-non Indigenous reconciliation can ably proceed.