Do you have capacity?

When Amy Profenna recently met with a lawyer to update her Will, one of the questions she was asked was if she wanted to be cremated.

“I have been half in love with easeful Death.” So wrote poet John Keats two centuries ago. For him it was sorrowful, yet his succinct sentence could well describe our current perspective in this country. 

An estate gift to your parish or favourite charity can be your way of expressing what was important in your life. What follows are some of the ways people choose to remember charities in their estate plan.

New federal government rules to monitor euthanasia and assisted suicide are opaque and weak at a time when legally induced deaths are rising at alarming levels, warn several organizations.

Whenever a doctor assists in a suicide in Ontario by injecting a patient with chemicals to stop the heart, it is recorded on the death certificate as a natural death. 

VATICAN – With the July 5 death of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the office of camerlengo is now vacant. A sensitive position, above all in the period between the death of a pope and the election of his successor, the Church awaits Pope Francis’ nomination of a new camerlengo.

VATICAN – Pope Francis attended the funeral Mass and presided over the final commendation of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the French cardinal who led the Vatican's outreach to other religions and who had announced to the world his election as pope five years ago.

Death has lived in the shadows and been discussed in whispers for a very long time.

Gone prematurely, remembered always.

Rebecca Maureen (Becky) Beaton passed away early one mid-May morning after a gutsy 30-month battle with cancer. Becky was just 36 and I was proud to call her my niece for that seemingly brief period of time.

VATICAN CITY – Heaven is not an eternally dull existence but rather the completion of a journey toward a promised encounter with the Lord, Pope Francis said.

MANCHESTER, England – Celebrating the funeral of a disgraced Scottish cardinal, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales invoked the mercy of God and asked for prayers of healing.

This past fall, my mother received a call from the care home in Yorkton, Sask., where her eldest sister was a resident. My mother was informed that her sister had taken a turn in health and there likely wasn’t much time left. 

Jesuit Fr. Bill Ryan was never going to settle for a small, quiet, unobtrusive, private faith. For the Harvard-educated economist any notion that God was real, that God intends justice, must be met with real, concrete and public action.

MONTREAL - Fr. Gerald Pocock, who died Sept. 4 in Ottawa at age 92, was a gregarious Roman Catholic chaplain at Montreal’s St. Mary’s Hospital in 1969 when he befriended American jazz legend Duke Ellington.