The Catholic argument against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia need not be based on religious precepts, and if it is presented in explicitly religious terms it will probably lose, said students from the University of St. Michael’s College after watching Dr. Donald Low’s plea for assisted suicide recorded eight days before he died.

TORONTO - In a crowded church basement, surrounded by boxes of emergency supplies donated and packed by parishioners, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a quadrupling of Canada’s aid to the typhoon stricken Philippines.

TORONTO - People working in the public health field need to think more about the ethical dimensions of what they are doing, a St. Michael’s Hospital scientist argues in a commentary published this month in the Canadian Journal of Public Health.

TORONTO - If you are what you pray for, Toronto is now one with the thousands of Christians around the world who suffer for their faith.

TORONTO - Doing the right thing is important. But who gets to do it matters almost as much, medical ethicist Fr. Mark Miller told about 70 people gathered for a Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute lecture.

TORONTO - Demand for doctor-assisted suicide isn’t about dying, it’s about disability, the director of a Quebec disability rights organization told a national anti-euthanasia symposium in Toronto Nov. 8.

Updated 11/12/13

TORONTO - As pictures and reports of the devastation in Tacloban City, Philippines, reached the world’s newspapers and computer screens Nov. 9, Toronto Filipinos were attending the Saturday 5 p.m. Mass at Our Lady of the Assumption Church.

TORONTO - Experts on homelessness are giving the federal government credit for settling on the right approach to helping some of the most vulnerable people in Canada.

TORONTO - Loyola High School isn’t going to the Supreme Court of Canada just to get a ruling on whether the private school can teach world religions from a Catholic, Jesuit point of view. The real fight is over whether churches, charities and schools across Canada have a right to religious freedom, said Paul Donovan, the Montreal school’s principal

The Vatican is seeking worldwide input on such issues as marriage, same-sex marriage, contraception, divorce and family life in a wide-ranging questionnaire distributed to bishops.