If you think St. Augustine instilled the Church with phobias about sex, you probably don’t understand St. Augustine, PhD student Meghan Bowen told an audience of theology students Jan. 9 at Regis College in Toronto.

OTTAWA – With the ubiquitous use of smartphones and computer screens, today’s youth face both immense challenges and opportunities, say Catholic youth leaders.

Several years ago, a man showed up at a magazine company where I worked demanding to be paid “his” million dollars.

VATICAN CITY – Be cautious about scientific data that offer to be the sole basis and single explanation for the differences between men and women, the Vatican newspaper said.

VATICAN CITY – Sex should be focused on love, not egotism or pleasure, according to the Vatican.

Sex is not something the Church fears or is trying to control. Sex is not the opposite of prayer and spirituality, it’s not something we grudgingly concede to the young. Sex is not merely the mechanism of reproduction, although there’s no such thing as a full and true understanding of sex that can’t live with our human capacity to make babies.

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican commission on clerical sexual abuse has wrapped up a turbulent week-long meeting during which one of two victims on the panel was effectively ousted and Chilean Catholics upset that Pope Francis has not sacked a controversial bishop delivered protest letters.

No generation in history, I suspect, has ever experienced as much change as we have experienced in the past 60 years. That change is not just in the areas of science, technology, medicine, travel and communications, it is especially in the area of our social infrastructure, of our communal ethos. And perhaps nowhere is this change more radical than in how we understand sex. In the past 70 years we have witnessed three major, tectonic shifts in how we understand the place of sex in our lives.

VATICAN CITY - Eradicating male and female identities does nothing to solve the problem of unfair or disrespectful treatment based on people's gender, Pope Francis said.

TORONTO - The Pan Am Games will be a big deal for Toronto. They will cost $1.4 billion. With less than 100 days to go, more than 350,000 tickets have been sold. With athletes coming from 41 countries, it’s bigger than the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver — the largest multi-sport event ever held on Canadian soil.

PHOENIX - Catholic Charities of Arizona is preparing to serve an increased number of sex-trafficking victims arrested by local police in the days surrounding Super Bowl Sunday.

TORONTO - Trying to avoid the parental backlash that erupted over its revised health and sex education curriculum in 2010, the Ontario Liberals have established an online consultation process on an updated sex-ed curriculum to be implemented in September. But already, it has run afoul of one parent group.

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican has ordered a Roman Catholic diocese in eastern Paraguay to remove a priest accused of sex abuse in the United States and to restrict the activities of the bishop who hired him.

It always seems as if a sex scene in a movie begins just as my parents walk into the room and suddenly I feel very awkward watching the movi e. But when I am alone or with my friends, this same sex scene is merely another scene in a movie.