VATICAN CITY – When white smoke poured out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel on October 16, 1978, Fr. Eamon Kelly, a seminarian studying in Rome at the time, couldn’t have known that he was witnessing the election of a future saint.

The main driving force of history is neither politics nor economics but rather the culture in which these human conditions exist, or so thought a pope who witnessed the phenomenon first hand.

One of the 20th century’s most vocal Church antagonists is dead. The Rev. Ian Paisley died peacefully in Northern Ireland on Sept. 12, ending a life that for most of its 88 years was spent stoking division and inciting violence between Protestants and Catholics in his troubled homeland. 

OTTAWA - Conservative MP Wladyslaw Lizon’s Bill C-266 to designate April 2 Pope John Paul II finally passed through a Senate committee May 12 and is expected to come to a vote in the fall.