In challenging the prevailing winds on euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide, the Catholic bishops of Ontario have done the entire country a service. So-called “mercy killing” is a human rights issue, true enough, but it is about the right to live, not the “right” to die.

The documentary Lost Tomb of Jesus, for all its trumpery, posed a question that is as relevant this Easter as it was two millennia ago: Did Jesus rise from the dead? Even if the answer is self-evident to Christians, it does no harm to be able to explain it to the rest of the world in which we live.

One of the Catholic Church’s most valuable and humble services to the people of Saskatchewan is coming to an end. Regrettably, the owners of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the small city of Humboldt have been told their religion is no longer welcome at the governance of of their institution.

One of the problems of war is that its casualties are not limited to combatants; they include what military strategists euphemistically call “collateral damage” inflicted by “friendly fire.”

There was an interesting contrast in the news last month between the attitudes of today’s youth toward politics and the way it is practised at the highest levels in this country. Among Canada’s young, there was inspiring idealism and belief in the nobility of political life. Among our politicians, not so much.

There are whole generations alive who were born too late to remember this, but back in the late 1960s, there were grand predictions that within a decade or two we would all enjoy the Leisure Society, a time when we’d spend far less time working and far more time doing all those things we truly wanted to do.

The second anniversary of the infamous Bill C-38, the act that legalized same-sex marriage, will be coming up this year. It hasn’t taken two years for some of the dire predictions about the inevitable erosion to religious freedom to come true.

Every week brings new headlines of battles won and lost on the family front. Too often, they are depressingly familiar: another aspect of the traditional family bites the dust in the quest for personal self-fulfilment.

It’s fascinating to watch how we’ve all become so busy being green. Blame it on our weird winter, or the ever-increasing traffic gridlock in our cities, but Canadians are finally beginning to join the world in their concern about environmental destruction.

Many people will have their stories about Archbishop Anthony Meagher, who died Jan. 14 at age 66, but I will always remember him as the first-time visitor to my house who put his feet on my coffee table.