EDMONTON - When it came time to build the new St. Joseph’s Seminary, cutting expenses was a must. To save money, a pipe organ for the seminary chapel was left as a project for the future.

“We priced out how much an organ would be, and it’s a lot of money,” said Fr. Shayne Craig, seminary rector.

“For a new pipe organ, for the size we would want in the chapel, we were being quoted a price of $500,000.”

A battle is looming between the Ontario government and Catholic schools after the Education Minister rejected a key component of a new anti-bullying policy from the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association (OCSTA).

Laurel Broten is insisting that Catholic schools permit single-issue clubs such as gay-straight alliances despite the OCSTA’s outright rejection of such groups in a long-awaited document titled Respecting Differences.

Released Jan. 25, Respecting Difference affirms the Catholic identity of Catholic schools by stating that all clubs and activities must be “respectful of and consistent with Catholic teaching.” The document follows the Accepting Schools Act introduced last November by the minority Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty that would require all schools to accommodate gay-straight alliances or similar clubs under a different name.

The award is nice, but St. Patrick's Catholic Secondary School principal John Shanahan has a different measure of success.

Shanahan is one of 40 educators who will be honoured as "Canada's Outstanding Principals of 2012" by The Learning Partnership at a Feb. 28 gala dinner in Toronto's Sheraton Centre. The Learning Partnership is a charity that advocates for and supports public education. It's best known for Take Your Kids to Work day.

Shanahan is bashful, unwilling to talk about the award as a personal achievement. But he has lots to say about his school, his teachers and most of all his students.

TORONTO - Everything Jim Gregory has in life is a result of his association with Toronto’s St. Michael’s College School, he said.

Serving the NHL today as senior vice president of hockey operations, Gregory is one of six alumni being inducted into the Order of St. Michael this year, the highest honour St. Michael’s College School can bestow on a member of its community.

“I look up to the people who they have in the Order of St. Michael and never dreamt I’d be considered for it,” said Gregory, 76. “So when I was called, it was an unbelievable surprise.”

Black Friday costs the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board big money. On the day in November when U.S. shopping malls offer crazy bargains the board had 133 of its employees off work — 48 claimed a personal day; the rest called in sick.

Teachers, janitors, secretaries call in sick in unusual numbers on Mondays, Fridays, before a long weekend, before March break and around American Thanksgiving, according to Jamie Bumbacco, the Windsor-Essex board’s executive superintendent of human resources.

TORONTO - The Marshall Medium student newspaper was looking for hot topics for its spring 2011 issue. So when 12th-grader Erica Lenti pitched a story about the gay-straight alliances springing up in Ontario schools, the newspaper staff was sold.

Lenti interviewed staff and students at Marshall McLuhan Catholic Secondary School in Toronto and the article passed through editing. But when Lenti picked up a copy of The Medium, she learned her story had been pulled.

Her facts were incorrect, she was told. Her take: school administrators wanted nothing to do with the topic.

VATICAN CITY - Many readers of the Vatican's official newspaper might have been taken by surprise in mid-January by an article effusively praising a well-known exhibition of "plastinated" human bodies, which was making an extended stop in Rome.

"Body Worlds," which L'Osservatore Romano called a "wonderful ode to respect for the body," is an exhibition of preserved human corpses, displayed in often sporty stances.

OTTAWA - Despite the many cases in recent years of unfaithful priests, an expert on sexual abuse and pornography predicts a future with a “much healthier Church and healthier priests.”

Peter Kleponis is a Pennsylvania psychologist who has counselled priests who sexually abused minors as well as men addicted to pornography, his specialty. He says the Church has gone through a painful phase and, although “it’s not over yet,” there is reason for optimism.

“There is hope. There is change,” said Kleponis. But, he adds, “there is still more purification and purging that needs to be done.”

Dominicans have a long history of being rather dissatisfied with this world. But they have never merely complained.

Canadian Dominican Father Philippe LeBlanc has complained, but never aimlessly. He pioneered a Dominican presence at the United Nations in Geneva. Beginning in 1996, in partnership with Franciscans International, LeBlanc and a band of Dominicans have been standing up at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights to point out where the world has failed, where power and blind arrogance has injured the poor, where dignity has been forgotten.

Charles Freeman offers a history of medieval relic worship that is both intriguing and engaging — but not, in the end, sympathetic to its subject.

Freeman ambitiously tackles the long Middle Ages — from the start of relic worship among early Christians to the Renaissance and Reformation, when the cult of saints and the reality of miracles began to be questioned. There are many relics in Holy Bones, Holy Dust, but Freeman finds few saints as he generally disparages the Medieval men and women who wrote about, built around and venerated relics.

The author deserves praise for trying to bring together into one story, spanning more than 1,500 years, the complex facets of relic worship from across Europe. Scholars specializing in medieval religion tend, instead, to focus on one area, period or cult.