For the parish that seeks to know, understand and draw a little closer to suffering — the suffering of Christ on the Cross or the suffering of their brothers and sisters — there is a resource hidden in the pews, quietly praying. People who struggle with depression, addiction, anxiety, compulsions and social phobias have suffered, will suffer and know suffering. The mentally ill and those struggling with mental health can teach a parish about suffering.

When Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us” in a comic strip back in 1970, he didn’t know the half of it. Pogo never heard of Twitter, attack ads, bot farms or “doing your own research.” Pogo could never have imagined a Church or society broken down into political and cultural sects caught up in perpetual rhetorical war with one another.

Repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, endorsing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, confessing the sin of a colonizing mentality, promising to stand with Indigenous peoples when they struggle for their land and their rights and committing the Church to reconciliation with Indigenous people world-wide — all this arrived in a two-page statement issued jointly by two Vatican dicasteries as another step in the pilgrimage of penance Pope Francis undertook in Canada last summer.

The federal government plans to spend a lot of money — $496.9 billion in 2023-24 — but the growth in federal spending projected by the latest budget hasn’t done anything for Canadian agencies that deliver humanitarian assistance and development aid in poor countries around the world.

The $30 million Indigenous Reconciliation Fund has achieved its first-year goal of raising $9.4 million and the fund’s board has greenlit 17 projects.

After Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy finished outlining how his government intended to spend $204 billion in 2023-2024, hospice director Julie Aubé and her team at Maison McColloch Hospice in Sudbury were still dependent on the Sudbury Food Bank to feed patients at the largest hospice in the province.

There are 40,000 Catholic teachers in Ontario and thousands more in the four provinces that provide some level of public funding to Catholic schools, to say nothing of even more who work in private Catholic schools. But there’s no Catholic teachers’ college in Canada, with the lone exception of the Faculty of Education at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S. — not a province with publicly funded Catholic schools.