Michael Duggan has been appointed the first CWL Chair for Catholic Studies at St. Mary’s University College in Calgary.

This is the first endowed chair of its kind in Western Canada and is funded by the Catholic Women’s League. The permanent, senior academic position was established to encourage the advancement of Catholic education through exemplary teaching and research.

St. Mary’s is a Catholic, student-focused liberal arts and science teaching institute.

As hints of back-to-school begin to drift into academic consciousness, professors and administrators at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont., are still in labour negotiations.

The SJU Academic Staff Association was certified as a union by the Ontario Labour Relations Board April 24. The professors said they needed the legal protection of a labour contract in light of changes in how the Catholic college at the University of Waterloo is governed.

“Negotiations are underway, but proceeding slowly,” staff association president David Seljak told The Catholic Register in an e-mail.

The latest enrolment numbers indicate good times for university level Catholic education, but that doesn’t mean Catholic colleges don’t face long-established challenges, said David Sylvester.

There are no separate statistics for the Catholic institutions, but the liberal arts and humanities numbers are a good indication of where Catholic colleges stand, said Sylvester, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities in Canada.

University enrolment grew 3.7 per cent last year to 1.1-million university students across the country.

Bruno, Sask. - Nestled in the prairie community of Bruno, the St. Therese School of Faith and Mission, which offers a nine-month Catholic formation program for adults, is proving to be one of the first fruits of the new evangelization as it brings its students into a deep relationship with God.

Sylvie Quiring, a recent alumnus of St. Therese, said the school’s unique programming, with a strong emphasis on both personal sanctity and the duties of the apostolate as an outflow of this, has been an experience of total love and acceptance.

Youth Protecting Youth, the student pro-life organization at the University of Victoria, has regained its status as an official school club after being denied funding and recognition for the past two years.

The club filed a petition to the British Columbia Supreme Court against the University of Victoria Students’ Society (UVSS), which had withheld the club’s grants, on May 3. In the petition, it requested its club status and funding be reinstated and that the Students’ Society declare the previous actions of denying it the same rights as other clubs illegal. The UVSS had been retaining grants to Youth Protecting Youth that all university clubs are entitled to on the grounds that the club violated the school’s regulations against harassment.

TORONTO - Sr. Helen Prejean, the American nun renowned for her opposition to the death penalty and for accompanying those about to die in their final steps, captivated a Toronto audience April 20 with the story of her continuing journey.

Prejean’s first experience spiritually accompanying a convicted killer, Patrick Sonnier, was chronicled in a book and made into the 1995 feature film Dead Man Walking.

CALGARY - Just five months after trespassing charges were stayed for members of a pro-life club at the University of Calgary, eight student members are now facing charges of non-academic misconduct.

The charges resulted from a Genocide Awareness Project display the group hosted April 8 and 9. Its display, which compares abortion to atrocities such as the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust, had been hosted without incident eight times since 2006. On April 8, campus security allegedly asked the students to turn their signs inward or leave the campus grounds. They refused.

TORONTO - Well-known capital punishment opponent Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., will be giving the inaugural lecture honouring the prison ministry of the late Fr. Martin Royackers, who was murdered in Jamaica nine years ago.

Royackers was 41 when he was gunned down in front of his parish in Annotto Bay, Jamaica.

Dialogue interruptus may be the norm in a world crammed with distractions, but this interruption was 40 years.

{mosimage}On the campus of the university that helps fuel the world's instant communication addiction - e-mail all the time and everywhere courtesy of Blackberry phones - it might be something like heresy. But for St. Jerome's University staffer Jim Robson, giving up internal e-mails for a day is actually a spiritual exercise.

St. Jerome's had its first No E-mail Day Feb. 11 and held another March 11. The idea is that by fasting from internal e-mails, workers will be encouraged to actually talk to one another, said Robson.