Features

TORONTO - "Contraception why not?" is the question that Dr. Janet Smith has been posing to audiences for 20 years, a talk that has led to the sale of more than one million taped copies of her talk sold worldwide.

TORONTO - Ontario's Catholic community is embarking on another all-embracing discussion about the "distinctiveness, value and the future of Catholic education." The plan for the province-wide consultation was announced Nov. 25 at a symposium organized by the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE).

TORONTO - If Ontario's Catholic schools are struggling to stay afloat in turbulent waters, it would seem that half the time Catholics are stirring up the waves themselves. At a two-day conference dealing with the subject Nov. 24-25, leaders of the provincial separate school system struggled with how to overcome differences and face external challenges united.

TORONTO - Failure to reduce Canada's 17-per-cent child poverty rate over the past five years is creating a deficit that can't be erased by paying down government debt, say the authors of Campaign 2000's 2006 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty.

TORONTO - With the elections out of the way, Ontario's new Catholic trustees will be shown the ropes of their job Jan. 12-13 in Toronto.

TORONTO - Following St. Francis into Advent starts with a concrete, physical, tangible, searingly real sense of the incarnation, according to Toronto-area Franciscans who will spend the four weeks leading up to Christmas doing things most Catholics do — preparing a Christmas crèche, attending Advent liturgies, singing carols and getting ready for the Feast of the Nativity.

TORONTO - The seemingly endless debate about private versus public health care in Canada naturally lends itself to a Catholic take, bioethicist Bridget Campion told a small audience at the end of an evening in which the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute split the podium between pro-medicare family doctor Claudette Chase and pro-private sector economist John Kyle.

OTTAWA - The Crusades are widely seen as a barbaric series of wars led by a ruthless Catholic Church against peaceful inhabitants of the Holy Land, says Anthony Schratz, an amateur historian who has spent 20 years investigating controversies in church history.

The Israelites of biblical times could never have predicted that a couple thousand years down the road nations would face off against each other with weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands all at once. But they did know about arms races, and they knew about the relationship of small nations with great empires.

The Jolly Green Giant used to urge us all to "Look up, look waaay up." The Toronto Catholic District School Board is looking up into the air above some of it's old, crumbling and underpopulated schools and hoping to see some new money.