“Was this story about love, money, conquest or disaster?” That was the question Gordon Sinclair asked week after week on CBC-TV’s long-running Front Page Challenge. If a news story did not have at least one of those four elements, Sinclair surmised, it might be a story, but it wasn’t news.
Vanessa Santili-Raimondo: Plastic pollution a sign of failing stewardship
By Vanessa Santilli-Raimondo, The Catholic Register
When I was 10 years old, I’d spend hours creating posters that screamed out in bold letters: “Save the Whales!”
OTTAWA – Prodded by an increasing intolerance for those who profess pro-life convictions — most pointedly and menacingly by no one less than our prime minister — my wife and I decided it was time to walk the walk and made our way up to Ottawa for the 21st annual National March for Life. I had attended one of the very earliest of these marches back around the turn of the century and had a pretty good idea what we were in for.
Forty years ago, I moved to Alberta from Saskatchewan imbued with the stereotype that my new province was full of cowboys, fundamentalists and wealthy oil barons who cared nothing about the environment. It didn’t take me long to realize that while there was truth in the stereotype, Alberta had numerous people who fell outside this cartoonish caricature.
Calls for reinvigorating religious public life within our seeming secular monoculture have traditionally relied heavily on morally grounded arguments.
A former student sent me a notice that caught my attention, for both artistic and pious reasons. The Cantata Singers of Ottawa will be at St. Joseph’s Church later this month where the entire program will consist of settings of the brief Eucharistic and Marian hymn, Ave Verum, including those of Lassus, Byrd, Mozart, Elgar, Liszt, Saint-Saëns and Poulenc.
When I started out on the Church on the Street, I gave little thought to some of the logistics of such a ministry apart from determining that it would be 8 p.m. onwards every Thursday evening.
Maybe they didn’t get the memo. Maybe it was simple human error. Maybe they simply don’t care.
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Last week’s record financial award to a man abused by a monstrous priest 50 years ago is cringeworthy on many levels.
Our small English-language parish in a borough of Montreal is hardly a hot bed of serious surprises. Recently, though, we received some rather hard news.