Michael Swan, The Catholic Register

Michael Swan, The Catholic Register

Michael is Associate Editor of The Catholic Register.

He is an award-winning writer and photographer and holds a Master of Arts degree from New York University.

Follow him on Twitter @MmmSwan, or click here to email him.

TORONTO - The Canadian wing of the world-wide Focolare movement brought together interfaith leaders from Catholic, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu faiths March 20 to celebrate the memorial of Focolare founder Chiara Lubich at Toronto’s Noor Cultural Centre.

There’s little chance Canada will fulfill a pledge to resettle 1,300 Syrian refugees before the end of 2014, said the director of the Office of Refugees, Archdiocese of Toronto.

There have been five mass extinctions in the last 540 million years. Science tells us a sixth is now underway. But only faith can tell us how we will live through it.

TORONTO - There’s about one million Canadians who know suicide is wrong, assisted suicide turns doctors into murderers, the state has an obligation to protect life until natural death and that not everything in medicine depends on the freely chosen wishes of the patient. These people are not Catholic. They’re Muslim.

Making a documentary about Pope Francis is like making a motion picture about a moving target. Things are changing all around this Pope.

Standing in the dim, evening light on St. Peter’s Square a year ago, it never occurred to me a Pope might creep in, switch on the light and rouse us all from our sleep.

Getting the Vatican’s financial house in order will be no small task for the newly appointed members of the Vatican’s Council for the Economy, the lone Canadian on the 15-member council told The Catholic Register.

The better they know him the more Canadians like Pope Francis.

TORONTO - When hundreds of labour-sponsored protesters showed up at Toronto’s Eaton Centre to chant for a $14-per-hour minimum wage, the Liberal government at Queen’s Park had already decided to increase the lowest legal wage from $10.25 to $11 come June 1. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne also declared that no longer would inflation eat away at the minimum wage because yearly increases would be tied to the consumer price index.

Twenty-five years on, the case that began the world-wide Catholic sexual abuse scandal is still crawling through the court system and still on the minds of Newfoundland Catholics.