The Canadian Council of Churches has questions and it has plans. The questions are for the government and its plans are for Canada’s Christians.

As the CCC executive committee elected new officers, including the first Salvation Army president in the Council’s 68-year history, it also trekked to Parliament Hill to ask politicians and bureaucrats about environmental policy and plans for an Office of Religious Freedom within the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

“We went there knowing there are issues on the horizon that we would like to ask questions about and simply learn more about,” said CCC general secretary Rev. Dr. Karen Hamilton.

TORONTO - The dream of a cross-country Canadian Pax Christi organization is alive in Toronto, but struggling to find a foothold elsewhere.

Since the Toronto group of about 30 dedicated peace activists won the right to be called Pax Christi — Toronto it has received all kinds of inquiries about its work, but the group has struggled to translate that interest into membership.

“We’re getting more people interested,” said founding member Deacon Steve Barringer.

Early in his philosophy career, Professor Tom Langan was fired for being too left wing. Years later he helped found the Canadian Catholic Civil Rights League, an organization often called reactionary.

Langan died May 25 at Bridgepoint Hospital. For the last five months of his life at Bridgepoint, Langan was surrounded by family, friends and former students.

He was fired in the 1950s by his Jesuit-founded alma mater, St. Louis University. But Langan wasn’t unemployed long. Indiana University took him on and he eventually rose to chair of the philosophy department.

MONTREAL - The new attitude initiated by the Second Vatican Council and the changes in society in the last 50 years has deeply affected the life of the Church and the life of religious communities, 290 leaders of religious communities in Canada were told.

The leaders gathered here May 24-28 for the bi-annual assembly of the Canadian Religious Conference (CRC) at which time they also chose a new executive.

A suspected pipe bomb thrown through a window at 3:45 a.m. set off sprinklers and filled Brampton’s St. Jerome’s Church with smoke Tuesday, May 29.

There are early reports that one person was treated for smoke inhalation and the bomb squad was called in. Police sent a robot into the church to investigate a suspicious package. The explosive device was put in a secure container to be detonated later.

TORONTO - Ordaining deacons is just like Christmas. It's all about the word made flesh.

"Deacons are ordained to assist the Apostles proclaim the word and make that word a reality," Bishop Vincent Nguyen told 14 men he ordained to the second order of deacons on Saturday, May 26 at St. Michael's Cathedral.

TORONTO - The mentally ill occupy the streets of Toronto. They sleep there. They beg. They buy drugs. They rave, cry out in pain and frighten people. They pass through drop-ins, shelters, jails and the emergency wards but somehow almost always wind up back on the same little patch of urban territory.

Seeds of Hope Foundation executive director Kimberly Curry thought there must be something we can do for homeless, schizophrenic women. Sr. Susan Moran, co-founder of Out of the Cold program almost 25 years ago, had the same thought. She never thought giving people a mattress in a church basement one night a week fulfilled our Christian duty.

KINGSTON, ONT. - A simple yet dignified ceremony held May 19 on the waterfront of this southeastern Ontario city marked a tragic local anniversary: The death of more than 1,400 Irish immigrants fleeing the 19th-century potato famine.

Ireland’s Ambassador to Canada, Ray Bassett, laid a wreath on behalf of the Irish government in commemoration of the estimated 50,000 Irish immigrants who came through the area in 1847 fleeing Án Gorta Mór, “The Great Hunger.” Of those, an estimated 4,300 arrived in Kingston after contracting typhus on crowded “coffin” ships, with 1,400 dying after coming ashore to what was then a town of only 10,000 residents.

OTTAWA - Consumers should ensure products they buy are not produced by modern-day slaves, said the American Ambassador-at-large who monitors and combats human trafficking.

“It takes a cultural shift,” Ambassador Luis CdeBaca told a gathering of MPs, senators, diplomats and NGOs on May 17.

CdeBaca, who works under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said consumers must ask themselves: “Where did the shrimp come from that I’m eating? Where did the chocolate come from that I’m eating?”

OTTAWA - The Catholic Organization of Life and Family (COLF) has called the status quo on abortion “intolerable” and calls not only for “legislative reform” but also a “great cultural renewal.”

In its latest publication, “The Unborn Child: a gift, a treasure and a promise,” COLF describes respect for life as a “gauge of civilization” and warns that when the right to life is not fully protected “other rights are sooner or later mocked.”

It points out that in Canada there is no legal protection for the unborn child.