{mosimage}OTTAWA - Like incense, the white smoke of smouldering sweetgrass, cedar, sage and tobacco rises from a seashell as a small group of church-goers pray in the four cardinal directions, giving thanks to the Creator. As Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, S.J. , celebrates Mass, he does so in front of a wall papered with the view of a forest. 

This scene — where aboriginal Catholics in Ottawa welcomed Prendergast to celebrate Mass at the Kateri Native Ministry office — was certainly not the first time Catholicism and native spirituality have intertwined. But it is a growing reality in cities like Ottawa and Toronto where the population of First Nations, Metis and Inuit people is growing.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The world’s economic crisis hasn’t caught Catholic hospitals in Toronto unawares.

Although all Ontario hospitals are more than likely to encounter financial struggles this year, health care rationing and budget adjustments are all too familiar to Catholic institutions, said Hazel Markwell, executive director of the Centre for Clinical Ethics in Toronto.

{mosimage}Canada's former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy wants to re-embrace the moral vision of the nation’s nuclear weapons policy of 1945.

“To use nuclear weapons as a symbol of your greatness is not only immoral, it is pure mystique,” Axworthy told The Catholic Register. “Somehow there’s a perversion taking place. Rather than saying that one’s contribution to reducing poverty or changing the environment is to be a demonstration of one’s greatness, we’re using nuclear weapons because it is the ultimate weapon.”

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the period of penance, prayer and sacrifice that precedes the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. 

Since the earliest days of the church there is evidence of some form of Lenten preparation for Easter; but the duration and nature of this preparation took countless centuries to evolve and is still changing even today.  

{mosimage}TORONTO - The fear, suffering and sacrifice on Bay Street are nothing but nicks and cuts compared to the body blows the poor will suffer in this recession, according to church agencies that serve single mothers, the homeless and families in distress.

“Recession is a really hard time for people on social assistance, obviously,” said Rosalie Hall executive director Alan Nickell. Rosalie Hall helps hundreds of young women every year as they face pregnancy without an adequate place to live, without a job and without prospects.

{mosimage}PAPHOS, Cyprus - When I visited Cyprus recently, St. Paul the Apostle was the furthest thing from my mind. I was looking forward to touring the island mythology claims as the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love. It wasn’t until I reached the city of Paphos I was reminded Cyprus was Paul’s first stop on a phenomenal lifetime of evangelism. 

Around 47, accompanied by Barnabas and Mark, Paul introduced this beautiful island to a newer understanding of the word “love” in the person of Jesus Christ. That story is succinctly told in Acts of the Apostles: chapter 13:2-12. Barnabas, Paul and Mark are directed by the Holy Spirit to set out for Cyprus, which author H.V. Morton accurately describes as “a perfect blend of mountain and plain, of hills that slope to deserted bays half screened by olive trees.” After preaching in Salimas’s synagogues, they travelled to Paphos on the island’s luxuriant south coast, again preaching in Jewish synagogues.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Rev. Paul Bong Kyu Choi is not your grandfather’s kind of Calvinist. He’s definitely not Scottish, nor Dutch, and seems quite uninterested in the sort of dogmatic absolutism that translates into rules against dancing or contempt for Catholics trafficking in hocus-pocus spirituality and mystery.

The pastor of Toronto’s Holy Mountain Presbyterian Church is from Korea, where 19th-century Calvinist preaching swept the Asian nation and became the first widely successful brand of Christianity there. He is also working on his PhD thesis under Jesuit Father John Dadosky at Regis College. The Knox College student chose a Catholic thesis supervisor to deepen his understanding of iconic 20th-century Catholic monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton.

{mosimage}TORONTO - While in Bangkok Jenny Cafiso met a woman who was happy to be in a prison cell with 50 other people.

“It was a relief. It was the only way to sort of get away from the clutches of these people,” recalled Cafiso, director of Canadian Jesuits International — an agency that supports the international missionary work of English Canada’s Jesuits.

{mosimage}TORONTO - A major breakthrough in stem cell research may take the science of regenerative medicine beyond the stage of turning human embryos into raw material for medical procedures, but at least one Catholic ethicist wants to know more before she declares the end of ethical wars over the research.

Toronto's Dr. Andras Nagy of Mount Sinai Hospital announced a new technique for creating pluripotent stem cells that can develop into most other types of human tissue. Nagy's method of turning just about any cells (skin cells, blood cells, etc.) into stem cells avoids the use of spare embryos from in vitro fertilization and bypasses previous techniques that used viruses to turn back the clock on adult cells.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Maybe the bus ads should read, “There probably is a God, so stop worrying and get on with your life.”

A team of Toronto scientists has found that believers perform better in certain mental tasks because religious people are less likely to experience anxiety when they make a mistake. People who believe in God worry less.

“We suggest that religious conviction buffers against anxiety by providing relief from the experience of uncertainty and error, and in so doing, strengthening convictions and narrowing attention away from inconsistencies,” wrote psychology professor Michael Inzlicht and his team of researchers from the University of Toronto and York University in an article called “Neural Markers of Religious Conviction” published in Psychological Science on March 4.