TORONTO - Canadians' support for the only Catholic university in the former Soviet Union — which was recently backed up by a $1.2 million donation from businessman James Temerty — sends a strong message that promotes democracy and religious freedom in Ukraine, said Fr. Borys Gudziak.

“After the Orange Revolution hit, we had very high hopes for fully democratic prospects of an independent Ukraine,” the rector at Ukrainian Catholic University told The Catholic Register while in Toronto as part of a six-week tour of Canada, the United States and some European countries.

“We have (since) turned towards authoritarianism and some politically motivated trials.”

The Niagara Catholic District School Board and King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario have signed a partnership agreement to promote the life-long process of Catholic education. 

The partnership reflects the Niagara Catholic board’s focus on “building a strong Catholic identity and community to nurture the distinctiveness of Catholic education,” said John Crocco, the NCDSB’s director of education.

Crocco said the agreement will provide faith formation for the adult faith community at King’s College and the Niagara Catholic board, including individuals at the diocesan level.

MISSISSAUGA, ONT. - Teachers should address homophobia in Catholic schools and embrace the objective of gay-straight alliances, two presenters told delegates at a major education conference.

Kevin Welbes Godin, chair of the Catholic Association of Religious and Family Life Educators, and co-presenter Dave Szolloy, religious department head at Scarborough’s Mother Teresa Catholic High School, said GSAs are necessary to combat bullying in Catholic schools. They were speaking to about 30 teachers Oct. 28 at the When Faith Meets Pedagogy conference.

MISSISSAUGA, ONT. - Catholic teachers, in their “noble and ethical task” of educating youth about the Catholic faith, can help create a more “just” Canadian society by welcoming refugees, social justice activist Mary Jo Leddy told the 15th annual When Faith Meets Pedagogy conference. 

The Oct. 27 to 29 conference, which was sponsored by the Catholic Curriculum Corporation, featured workshops for Catholic school teachers across the province.

In keeping with the conference's theme “Room for all at the table: Gathered, Nourished and Sent Forth,” Leddy spoke on welcoming refugees in Canada.

VATICAN CITY - A holistic education of children and young people must include religious education in accordance with the wishes of the children's parents, Pope Benedict XVI told Brazil's new ambassador to the Vatican.

The teaching of religion in public schools, "far from signifying that the state assumes or imposes a specific religious creed, indicates a recognition of religion as a necessary value for the holistic formation of the person," the Pope said Oct. 31.

Along with every university in Canada, the nation’s Catholic colleges are stuffed to the gills with undergraduates. More than 90,000 Ontario students showed up for first-year classes this fall, almost 2,000 more than the double cohort year 2003, when the province’s universities were accepting two-years’ worth of high school graduates because Grade 13 had been eliminated.

“When I run a principal’s orientation session at the beginning of the year, I can only fit 250 into the room. We have 900 first-year students,” said David Sylvester, principal at King’s University College in London, Ont. “We can’t even fit them into a room to talk to them.”

Sylvester looks forward to running a more efficient orientation session in the fall of 2013, when the new $11-million Daryl J. King Student Life Centre will be completed. The new complex, designed to meet stringent environmental standards, will include a theatre, student union offices, informal meeting space, a cafe and games area and a learning commons.

Peterborough’s first Catholic liberal arts college is responding to the need for solid Catholic education for youth in the diocese, says Fr. Joseph Devereaux, chancellor of the Peterborough diocese.

“The focus is to provide something for youth that will help them,” said Devereaux.

“(It’s about) what can we do for youth intellectually, spiritually, socially. A well-rounded education can help provide that.”

OTTAWA - A new research centre at Ottawa’s Saint Paul University will study the contribution Canadians made to Vatican II as well as how the Council has shaped religious communities here.

A year before the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the Research Centre for Vatican II and 21st Century Catholicism launched Oct. 13. It will examine ecumenism and interreligious dialogue in contemporary society and look at issues of progress and decline in the Catholic community.

EDMONTON - Basilian Father Terry Kersch is a walking enigma, previously living the life of a soldier and then another as a man of the Gospel.

“The religious life and the military life, in some fundamental ways, are not all that different,” said Kersch. “In the military life, it’s the mission that takes precedence and part of your identity is putting yourself at the service of an overall mission.

OTTAWA - Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins urged Catholic school trustees not to compromise fidelity to the Catholic faith as they face government pressure to adopt policies contrary to Church teaching.

Speaking to the annual conference of the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association in Ottawa Sept. 23, Collins exhorted everyone involved in Catholic education to become disciples of Christ and to fully participate in the New Evangelization, which he described as proclaiming the Word in places where the Gospel has been forgotten and God has been squeezed out.

“We are marinated in secularism,” he said, urging those present to take a look at the working document for the upcoming Synod on the New Evangelization called by Pope Benedict XVI.