Fidel Castro is dead. Canada’s prime minister, whose father was an admirer and friend of the tyrant, is struck with grief, but it is not widely shared. Fidel’s death is an advance for Cuba. A more significant step forward will be when Fidel’s brother Raul, to whom power was handed over in 2006, follows his brother into eternity.
I call them the confessions of Sr. Immolatia. They are the words of a vibrant, spirit-led past parishioner of the Church on the Street.
One obvious failing of legalized assisted suicide is that Canada now recognizes a person’s right to receive a quick exit but fails to grant terminally ill people an offsetting right to humane care until their natural death.
Cardinal Willem Eijk of the Netherlands recently called on Pope Francis to write a major document on the growth of gender theory. Too many people, including Catholic parents, now accept that one can choose their own gender. Many Catholic school leaders in Canada have also bought into that idea.
The election of Donald Trump must have distressed Pope Francis. Or did it?
Prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners — torture according to the United Nations — has no place in a just penal system. Yet isolating inmates for lengthy periods remains common practice at Canadian penitentiaries. It must stop.
It’s continually surprising that people seem shocked or disappointed each time Pope Francis shuns modern convention and affirms some aspect of basic Church teaching.
Canadians living jam-packed lives barely have time to read their watches, much less pore over voluminous legal judgments on pressing matters of the day.
At a recent event in New York City, Cardinal Timothy Dolan achieved somewhat of a coup when he cajoled Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to set aside their obvious enmity and, in a private moment, pray together. A day earlier they had refused to even shake hands at a presidential debate. Yet at Dolan’s request the candidates agreed to pray, and afterwards they briefly hid their snarls and traded polite banter, creating what Dolan called a “touching moment.”
George Weigel might just be the most important lay Catholic at work today. The American writer’s books, essays, newspaper columns and lectures address the importance of defending the Catholic faith, and religion in general, from the assault of radical secularism.
Pope Francis will join Lutheran leaders in Sweden Oct. 31 to launch a year of commemoration leading up to next year’s 500th anniversary of the onset of the Protestant Reformation. At first glance, it seems an odd stage for the Pope to occupy.