The word “synod” is not in the average person’s everyday vocabulary, so when we’re confronted by the notion of a “synod on synodality” it’s no surprise many either run to a dictionary or simply roll their eyes. Maybe both.
Are you “hopelessly devoted”? No, not to your crush, your boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse, but to the Most High God?
The first responsibility of a journalist is to get the facts right. In that regard, I failed in my column “Lack of transparency shatters credibility” in the Oct. 17 Catholic Register. In that article, I took Canada’s bishops to task for failing to meet their responsibility to live up to agreements to provide healing and reconciliation to the survivors of residential schools.
She was only 16, a child by all accounts, and she had been sent to the big city from her home in northern Canada for treatment at a mental health clinic.
The board of a hospice society in suburban Vancouver is fighting for its pro-life life this October. It is also already looking ahead to new life for palliative care in a continent-wide network of euthanasia-free care centres.
Healing path
Re: Money will be raised, but how to spend it? (Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, Oct. 10):
On the night of July 28, 2012, an 82-year-old nun, along with two men, slowly climbed up a thickly-wooded hill surrounding the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where enriched uranium was stored for use in nuclear weapons. They crawled through holes they cut in barbed-wire fences, walked to the main building and proceeded to spray-paint biblical slogans, wrap crime scene tape around pillars and hammer away at concrete.
Plunking down in a pew for Sunday Mass on Thanksgiving weekend brought a good deal of satisfaction and relief.
In Judeo-Christian terms we speak about the notion of abetting evil. A Catholic doctor will not only refuse to perform euthanasia but will not refer the patient to someone who will. The referral is a form of abetting evil; paving the way for the act to happen.
Store displays and front lawns are filling up with skeletons, ghosts and all things ghoulish in preparation for Halloween, a favourite occasion among most children.
Thanks is a word and a way of being. It seeks out the gift in what is. It assumes there is a gift to be seen here. In the hardest seasons of my life, thanks has been a ladder out of darkness. A therapist once reminded me through my tears that what we focus on is magnified. When we actively practise gratitude, the gifts of the present become easier to see.