TORONTO - When the culture seems to be in decline, women are called to be countercultural.

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.

Move over Batman and Daredevil. Here comes the Masked Saint.

The Church must uphold “the objective truths of Sacred Scripture” in the face of a secular culture that poses a grave challenge to the Christian view of family, Toronto Cardinal Thomas Collins told the Synod of Bishops meeting in the Vatican.

Seeds of the Word: Finding God in the Culture (Word On Fire, hardcover, 275 pages, $24.95).

The teen vampire series Twilight has at least one thing in common with the prolific 20th-century Catholic writer and monk Thomas Merton — they both have a part in teaching us about God in the culture.

ROME - The canonization of Blessed Junipero Serra honours a famous missionary who was motivated by love of God, but it also is a call to recognize how the process of evangelization must respect peoples and their cultures, said the head of the Franciscan order.

In a nation where violence is no stranger to its youth, a group of Salvadoran teenagers stand as a hope for their country’s future.

TORONTO - The Toronto Catholic District School Board and Villa Charities are entering a unique partnership to build a new state-of-the-art shared facility that will house Dante Alighieri Academy and the Columbus Centre.

Two recent papal-related events highlighted that Catholicism is meant to be a religion of culture. Every culture, as St. John Paul II taught, answers the fundamental questions of life and different cultures are differentiated by their response to the mystery of God.

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican has released a new Arabic-language guidebook, the first of its kind, which aims to bring the culture of the Catholic Church to a new audience.

OTTAWA - Now that the tragic history of Canada’s residential schools has been thoroughly documented, it’s time for healing, said Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Catholic schools are ready for reconciliation, ready to equip the next generation with an honest history of Canada, but there’s work to be done.

VATICAN CITY - Abortion, abandoning migrants at sea, unsafe working conditions, malnutrition, terrorism and euthanasia are all "attacks on life," said Pope Francis.

HAMILTON, ONT. - At Hamilton’s St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, members of the senior soccer teams are learning more than just tactics, strategy and skills specific to their sport; they’re learning how faith contributes to their game.

Now that I am under no professional obligation to read court decisions, I generally avoid them. The turgid prose, the unctuous self-regard and the complacent sense of judicial superiority I find unpleasant and soporific.