There’s a moving van load of unpacking to be done with new data delivered by the Angus Reid Institute and Cardus think tank on the state of organized religion in Canada.

During Holy Week, debate erupted on social media — quelle surprise — over the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. One would-be stumper hoped to best everyone by demanding rhetorically: “If it’s not an image of Christ, how do you explain it?”

We live in a world when the sin of pride has disfigured the virtues of courage, integrity and perseverance into the ideology of winning even if that requires denying the humanity of others.

Two mercifully flown decades ago, Mr. Dan Brown foisted on the world from some printing presses the Luddites sadly missed smashing, a purported novel called The Da Vinci Code.

Neither truth nor reconciliation is served by claims that cannot be reconciled with what is known to be true.

As this issue of The Catholic Register reaches readers, our colleague Michael Swan will be packing his bags for Rome to cover Pope Francis’ meeting with Indigenous delegates from Canada. Given Swan’s reportorial industry, our upcoming issues will no doubt be heavily weighted with stories on who said what to whom and, most crucially, what it all meant. Against two years of pandemic, and now the horrors in Ukraine, the sessions that begin in Rome March 28 mark a historic moment for speeding up the snail’s pace process of reconciliation between Canada’s First Nations and its, shall we say, later arrivals.

In his homily drawing from the Gospel narrative of the Transfiguration of Jesus, on the Second Sunday of Lent, Pope Francis issued a call to communion, and a reminder of the meaning of the communion of the saints.

Fifty-two years ago this June, Mr. Edwin Starr immortally caught millions of ears around the world with a song that asked a short, sharp rhetorical question.

Last Friday morning, in the leadup to Lent, with Vladimir Putin’s invading troops on the doorstep of Ukraine, Pope Francis paid a surprise call on his neighbours at the Russian embassy on Rome’s Via della Conciliazione. 

Seven years ago this spring a high-profile and very public Catholic commentator noisily left the Church after having already abandoned and returned to it previously.