NEWS

The Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board is using toys in a pilot project aimed at increasing communication skills between students.

The suburban board to the west of Toronto has partnered with Twenty One Toys to introduce its innovative Connexions puzzle packages into the classroom.

Founded by Montrealer Ilana Ben-Ari, the toy company aims to prepare future employees for the job market by teaching them the importance of creativity, collaboration and innovation when problem solving. The Connexions puzzle challenges two participants to configure 10 different three dimensional shapes into the same pattern without the use of their eyes. The aim is to strengthen communication skills.

“It’s an opportunity to work together with fun or play at the centre (but) really with the focus on deepening our understanding of how we work together,” said Shirley Kendrick, the board’s superintendent of special education and support services.

“From a Catholic perspective one of the things that was intriguing to us was the whole concept of honouring the dignity of all students.”

According to Kendrick, the board’s director of education and associate director responsible for instructional services — John Kostoff and Ralph Borrelli respectively — challenged staff this year to look at 21st century learning for all. This led Kendrick and assistant superintendent Les Storey to Twenty One Toys.

“One of our brilliant and leading academic consultants, Stephen Hurley, introduced the concept to me … and that’s how we met Ilana,” said Kendrick. “The artist and designer looked from an industry perspective and she was given a grant to look at supporting students who were nonsighted and trying to get them to work with their sighted peers.”

Of course communicating this way can be frustrating, said Storey, especially for sighted peopled. But that’s part of the learning process.

“It’s also a chance when we do it in schools for kids to reflect on identifying when they got frustrated (and) what’s making you frustrated,” said Storey. “It’s not just about special ed students. This is a chance to level the playing field for everybody. It gives everyone an equal opportunity to be part of the conversation and discussion.”

Staff are presenting the products to schools and gauging the program’s effectiveness as well as ways of introducing it into the classroom. Those participating in the pilot project include teachers, youth workers, dictional resource workers and support staff.

“We’re very excited to hear the feedback from the field,” said Kendrick. “We’re excited to hear how did people use them and to hear the narrative or the stories that come back to us to say, we started with this and it’s grown into something that perhaps we didn’t expect.”

While details about how exactly these toy packages will be introduced, and used, is still to be worked out, the intention is already clear.

“We think about the application of these toys or other supports as a way of saying … the types of supports that some students need really can be good types of support for all,” said Kendrick. “We all need to learn to see what others are feeling.”

TORONTO - Fr. Tom Gibbons believes the Catholic Church needs to strengthen its presence in the digital realm of parish life today to connect with the Catholics of tomorrow.

“I constantly have people coming up to me saying the Catholic Church doesn’t seem to talk to me any more. Technology has a role to bridge that gap,” said Gibbons, the associate pastor at Toronto’s St. Peter’s parish. “That being said we also have to be careful that the Mass doesn’t turn into a video game and that we’re worshipping God and not worshipping Google.”

As a former web developer for the U.S. bishops’ Catholic Relief Services, and one of the archdiocese of Toronto’s newest priests, having been ordained in May, Gibbons admits he’s likely more open to technology than the majority of his colleagues.

“With any technology I fall somewhere in between the spirit of Steve Jobs, where it is let’s keep on pushing the boundaries, and Jurassic Park where just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should,” he said. “There’s wisdom in navigating between those two, not always necessarily picking the one in the middle.”

What intrigues him is new technology’s potential to educate parishioners on what’s happening during the Mass — something he believes many in the pews don’t understand any more, causing them to feel disconnected.

“There’s no reason that there couldn’t be some (digital) interactive options before and after the Mass,” he said. “I do think that we could be more open to technology than we are, even in the liturgy.”

For this further integration to be successful, both in connecting with contemporary and future Catholics as well as preserving tradition, the conversation needs to start soon, said Gibbons. And that conversation must involve priests, bishops, theologians, academics and parishioners — especially those who feel disconnected from the current language of the Church.

While Gibbons said money keeps him from gently pushing the traditional boundaries by exploring the further integration of technology in the Mass, at least one priest in the archdiocese has overcome the financial hurdle.

When Fr. Mario Salvadori’s parish, St. Joseph the Worker in Thornhill, Ont., underwent a $1.3-million renovation, the businessman-turned-priest had the parish outfitted with a large screen on either side of the altar, a projector and a computer-friendly pulpit so he could reinforce the message of his homilies with digital media.

“If you are going to go beyond the traditional six-minute homily, you can’t keep their attention just verbally, you have to show them something,” said Salvadori. “The video puts an additional value into the message. The video helps to make another link that otherwise wouldn’t have been made.”

Although Salvadori’s willingness to integrate technology into the liturgy differs from that of Gibbons, both priests were able to agree that the Church needs to start speaking the language of the future — digital language.

“I don’t think you’re ever going to get someone with a tablet in the pews,” said Salvadori. “It’s about us as a Church better using technology to evangelize.”

Gibbons cites one factor in particular behind the Church’s deliberate pace — tradition.

“As a Catholic Church we tend to err on the side of tradition,” he said. “We ground our faith in tradition. Advances in technology tend to be a break in tradition.”

Neil McCarthy, director of communications for the archdiocese of Toronto, Ontario’s most digital diocese, understands this.

“Our approach is not to rush things, rather, to do it right than do it quickly,” said MacCarthy. “We are grounded in prayer and that can never be replaced by technology.”

While this sense of traditional stability is what Gibbons said attracted people to the Church in the past, it can create a barrier for younger Catholics who may feel out of touch with traditional methods to celebrate their faith.

“One of the knocks on the Catholic Church is that it’s so busy looking backwards that it forgets to look forward,” said Gibbons. “There are some ways in which I think religion should, needs, to bend to culture.”

It is happening slowly however. Many priests in the Greater Toronto Area are utilizing social media and uploading recordings of their homilies online, while many parishes have developed web sites. And MacCarthy said online fundraising shows great potential for an archdiocese the covers about 13,000 square kilometres, though it isn’t going to fully replace traditional forms of donating.

TORONTO - Three years ago Catholic commitment to refugees took a major step forward with a national conference of Catholic refugee offices. It’s time to take another step forward, Office for Refugees Archdiocese of Toronto director Martin Mark said.

ORAT will host a four-day national gathering of refugee ministries at the Toronto Crowne Plaza Airport Hotel Dec. 3 to 6. Mark predicts more than double the 70 delegates to the last refugee conference in 2010 will attend “With One Voice — We Are the Hope.”

While three years ago the focus was on organizing parishes to help Iraqi refugees, many of them Christian, this time around the refugee ministries will be finding ways to defend the civic sponsorship program as the federal government constantly adjusts its regulations and procedures for sponsoring refugees.

Recently Citizenship and Immigration Canada issued new forms that recognized refugees are expected to fill out if they wish to come to Canada. The guide for how to fill out the forms runs over 50 pages, said Mark. The Canadian government is also making its refugee forms available only over the Internet.

Not many people in refugee camps have access to the Internet and the traumatized and desperate may find a form with a 50-page guide daunting, Mark said.

The history of Catholic sponsorship of refugees has been through emotional waves of boom and bust, beginning with an outpouring of parish-based generosity more than 30 years ago when the plight of Vietnamese boat people inspired Canada’s civic refugee sponsorship system. As the boats faded from the south Pacific seas, Catholic sponsorship waned. The crisis in Iraq which sent two million refugees into Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere revived Catholic interest in sponsorship in 2006.

With the upcoming conference, Mark hopes to ensure the sustainability of a national network of Catholic sponsorship agencies.

While there is still a major problem of unsettled Iraqi refugees, more than half the world’s 42 million refugees are in Africa and there are many opportunities for parishes to contribute to solutions — and not all of them will tax a parish’s budget, Mark said.

There are 600 refugees in Ghana, in a UNHCR camp outside of the capital Accra. With a concerted effort, Canadian Catholic refugee sponsors could close that camp, said Mark.

The conference will begin with Mass celebrated with Cardinal Thomas Collins.

To participate in the conference, call Patricia Cross at (905) 889-5724 or e-mail her at pcpat@rogers.com.

TORONTO - The difference between right and wrong could be the difference between life and extinction as Earth’s climate continues to spiral out of control, a Yale University professor of forestry and religious studies told a Toronto audience Nov. 9.

Mary Evelyn Tucker is the director of Yale’s Forum on Religion and Ecology and was a frequent collaborator with the late Passionist father of ecotheology Fr. Thomas Berry. Speaking on “Future Generations and the Ethics of Climate Change” at the invitation of the University of St. Michael’s College’s Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology, Tucker made the case for an alliance between the worlds of religion and science.

While science is more comfortable with descriptive than prescriptive words about nature and cautious scientists have been reluctant to tell politicians what to do, religion has only very recently begun to address the environmental crisis and ecotheology is still rarely spoken of in seminaries. However, the state of the world’s natural systems demands the best thinking of both religion and science, said Tucker.

“We have to say continually that religion is necessary but not sufficient. We have to develop partners in science, in law, in policy,” she said.

“We need humility. We don’t have all the answers because we were late in coming to this.”

Even if there has been a widening gap between science and religion in the modern era, the world now needs the “deep spiritual resources” of world religions that have dedicated millennia to thinking about right, wrong and the common good. Religion has the ability to teach humanity to value nature as the source of life, rather than a collection of resources to be fed into the gross domestic product of nations, she said.

“We have to see environmental degradation as an ethical issue,” she said. “Until now degradation has been seen as the inevitable cost of economic growth.”

The beginnings of an ethics that addresses climate change would be a serious look at distributive justice, according to Tucker. There are already winners and losers around the globe as sea levels rise, droughts devastate farm land and more violent storms create climate refugees from New Jersey to Bangladesh. But distributive justice should also mean extending the reach of human rights to future generations who will have to live in the environment this generation leaves them.

While an ethic of rights might set minimum standards, drawing lines which must not be crossed, a true environmental ethic would concern itself with much more than the minimum. As nature always seeks flourishing, so should our ethics.

Our ethics should be based on a clear-eyed view of human beings as a “small but indispensable part of a 14-billion-year evolution,” she said. “We need an ethic that is culturally aware but also universally compelling.”

VATICAN CITY - Once the Vatican launches Pope Benedict XVI’s official Twitter feed before the end of the year, it’s hoped all the fake papal tweets will cease and desist, said a Vatican official.

There are dozens of unofficial @PopeBenedict handles and usernames in a number of different permutations and languages on Twitter; many are using an official portrait of the Pope as their avatar and some boast thousands of followers.

Some of these Twitter accounts are being run “obviously by people of goodwill” who tweet about real news and activities of the Pope, said a Vatican official who requested anonymity.

However, “We hope they will give up when they see the official site is up,” the official said.

The Vatican will have a verified and authenticated papal Twitter account, which will help users distinguish the official Pope Benedict stream from the imposters, the official said. No specific date has been set for its launch other than “before the end of the year,” he added.

Unfortunately, there are some phony accounts “that aren’t very helpful” because they obviously don’t have the best interest of the Pope or his teachings in mind.

For example, some bogus feeds produce off-colour or inappropriate commentary. But if it’s obviously satire, comedy or parody, “nothing can be done about that because of freedom of expression,” the official said. Yet, there’s little risk of people mistaking those accounts with the official account, he added.

However, if an account holder is using the Pope’s name with the aim of misrepresentation, misleading users or “username squatting” in order to prevent the Vatican from using the name or to illicitly offer the account name for sale, “then Twitter can close them down,” he said.

All the details about the official Pope Benedict Twitter account have not been hammered out, he said, such as which Twitter handles will be used and if there will be one username or different handles in different languages.

Feeds will be offered in five or six major global languages, though it’s not sure if Latin — the official language of the Church — will be one of them, he added.

Even though the Pope won’t be physically typing and sending the tweets, each message will be approved by the Pope himself, he said.

The idea of having an official papal Twitter account has been bouncing around for quite awhile.

To date, the Vatican offers a handful of official Twitter feeds in different languages, including Vatican news @news_va_en; Vatican communications @PCCS_VA; and the social network @Pope2YouVatican.

Pope Benedict sent his first ever papal tweet in 2011 when he inaugurated and launched the Vatican’s online news portal, www.news.va, which aggregates news content from the Vatican’s newspaper, radio, television and online outlets.

“Dear Friends, I just launched News.va. Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI,” the Pope said with a tap on an iPad, sending the message onto the news site’s Twitter account.

Pope Benedict has long urged Catholics and Catholic media to use the Internet and social networks for evangelization.

TORONTO - Irish singing sensations The Priests will headline the Venite Adoremus 2012 Christmas Concert to celebrate 10 years of media ministry by Salt + Light Catholic Media Foundation.

The Priests became global stars after their debut album in 2008 became the fastest selling classical debut of all time.

“As we enter our 10th year, I could think of no better way to celebrate this milestone than with a musical concert that features The Priests of Ireland,” said Fr. Tom Rosica, Salt + Light CEO.

“Several years ago, when we were asked at Salt + Light to promote (The Priests) in Canada, I gladly accepted and got to know the three men well. They are living examples of the New Evangelization and their message and music fit in very well with our mission at Salt and Light.”

According to Daniel Torchia, Salt + Light’s director of partnerships, “We’ve held two concerts with them (The Priests) at St. Paul’s Basilica in the past, which would be considered almost a warm up to this event.”

He describes these past performances as “smaller” and “more brief.” But the Dec. 6 concert at Toronto’s Koerner Hall “is really a full-fledged concert for classical music lovers, as well as the Catholic community.”

Rosanna Riverso and The Amabile Youth Singers, a group of about 40 girls ages 12 to 18 from London, Ont., will also be performing.

“It has been in incredible period of hard work, growth, evangelization, creativity and hope for the Church in Canada and far beyond,” Rosica said reflecting on Salt + Light’s first decade. “I would have never believed 10 years ago all that the Lord has been able to do through us this past decade.”

For tickets and information see www.saltandlighttv.org.

A “culture of silence” and deference to “political conservatism” has infected the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), charges the head of the Jesuit-founded Centre Justice et Foi (Justice and Faith) in Montreal.

In an open letter to CCCB president Archbishop Richard Smith, Elisabeth Garant said the elimination of the CCCB’s post of senior advisor for social justice, delaying and blunting the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace’s fall education campaign, inviting Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney to a private meeting and not criticizing refugee policy reforms amount to a “serious step back away from the rich Church tradition of social justice.”

Garant’s letter will be on the agenda of the next CCCB executive committee meeting Nov. 27-28. Until then, the conference has chosen to make no comment.

Garant served five years as a member of the CCCB’s Commission on Justice and Peace. She accuses the bishops of cozying up to the Conservative government because, she said, the CCCB has not engaged the Canadian government on an issue of social justice since December 2010. At that time, Kenney dismissed a letter from the bishops’ justice and peace commission as another in “a long tradition of ideological bureaucrats who work for the bishops’ conference producing political letters signed by pastors who may not have specialized knowledge in certain areas of policy.”

“From that moment we observe a silence,” said Garant. “Why are we silent on things that are not our personal issues but that we think for the common good we need to talk about?”

She also questions the CCCB for laying off social justice advisor Francois Poitras in order to help get its finances in order.

CCCB General Secretary Msgr. Patrick Powers has said layoffs were necessary. “We have had to rethink the way we do things, to do more and to cost less,” he told Canadian Catholic News.

“When Msgr. Powers said that this responsibility (for social justice) will be spread among other lay people at the conference, I don’t know any of them who have the experience or the competence to deal with social justice,” she said.

Garant also disputes the CCCB’s explanation behind the delay of the Development and Peace fall campaign. In a joint letter, the CCCB and Development and Peace explained that the campaign was delayed and modified because “concern was expressed that elements of the original materials could be a source of division among bishops, priests, parishioners and donors.”

“They are saying they do that for the sake of some faithful who will be hurt,” said Garant. “There’s no real proof of what they are talking about.”

Garant has yet to receive acknowledgment of her letter from the CCCB or Smith. Smith was in Rome in early November.

Though the Centre Justice et Foi has autonomy, it remains a Jesuit apostolate with the full confidence of Canada’s French-speaking Jesuit fathers, said Garant.

Toronto - On the journey from a hospital bed back home, a patient may be visited by licensed doctors, licensed nurses, licensed psychologists, licensed pharmacists, licensed physiotherapists and a chaplain.

This is scheduled to change some time in 2014, when chaplains in Ontario hospitals, jails and other institutions will be licensed and held accountable to a professional college — just like doctors, pharmacists and nurses.

“People who work in spiritual care are really touching very deep, vulnerable places in people,” said Christine O’Brien, spiritual care trainee at Bridgepoint Health in Toronto. “There should be some regulation about training. It shouldn’t be simply that I have a nice background and I’m a nice person. There’s too much involved in what actually happens in patient care.”

The provincial government isn’t trying to regulate religion or oversee prayer, said Joyce Rowlands, the registrar of the Transitional Council of the College of Registered Psychotherapists and Registered Mental Health Therapists of Ontario.

“There are people in the province who are pastoral counsellors or spiritual care therapists, as some call themselves, who actively have wanted to be part of this process and become members of the new college,” Rowlands told The Catholic Register.

Chaplains, particularly those employed by hospitals, will want to be part of the college because hospitals will begin to make membership the minimum standard for working in their spiritual care departments. A 1991 law specifically rules out prayer and ritual as a form of therapy that the government needs to regulate. But anyone who enters into a specifically therapeutic relationship with people who suffer serious emotional, cognitive or psychological issues will need to be part of the new college when it’s up and running.

Chaplains employed by the Church to provide sacramental ministry, anything from delivering communion to hearing confessions, will be exempt.

O’Brien is taking a 12-week, intensive Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at Bridgepoint, a major rehabilitation hospital in Toronto. O’Brien already has a Master of Divinity degree from Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College and will need four such units of CPE training plus a course on the legal responsibilities and limits of caregivers before she qualifies to be licensed by the new college. While the college can’t dictate who the hospitals hire, nobody in the field believes hospitals will hire chaplains who aren’t members of the college.

In the early going, working under a supervisor, O’Brien sees how her work fits into a team of professionals working toward healing for patients.

“We’re talking about talking with patients who are in a vulnerable state, because they are ill, about issues of meaning and purpose in their lives,” she said. “About perhaps whether they believe in an afterlife. Are they feeling judgment? Are they terribly frightened because they think of their mortality? Their doctor doesn’t want to talk about their mortality and all those issues. These are spiritual issues.”

Catholic clergy and volunteers who visit Bridgepoint are also part of the bigger, healing picture. Even though O’Brien is Catholic she can’t do her job and deliver communion to all the Catholic patients. Neither can she say Mass or hear confessions. But she can help people to see their lives in a broader spiritual context — an insight that will make Mass and sacraments less isolated events and more part of the fabric of life as patients heal.
But making chaplains into therapists might not be such a good idea, says Jesuit Father Desmond Buhager, Regis College lecturer in family therapy and pastoral counselling.

“It could be conceived of as a medicalization of the role of chaplain,” he said. “They’re part of a health care team, but we don’t start calling social workers occupational therapists. They simply aren’t. So why try to glom them (chaplains) together with psychotherapists? They’re not mental health workers... They’re chaplains.”

How people are held accountable matters, said Buhage. Spiritual care staffers, especially at hospitals, will find themselves part of a College of Psychotherapy and Registered Mental Health Therapist. The problem is they’re not psychotherapists, Buhager said.

“The idea of levelling everything to making chaplains all of a sudden psychotherapists or requiring them to be mental health therapists is inappropriate,” said Buhager, himself a registered psychotherapist in the United States. “It’s weird. Excuse me. We (psychotherapists) did five or six or seven years of training as therapists with specific course curriculum and clinical hours of supervision simply to be treated the same as people who have done a few CPE units? Doesn’t sound right.”

The act which mandates the college was passed at Queen’s Park in 2007. It is one of five new health care colleges being created in Ontario. But the 2007 act can’t be proclaimed into law until regulations are in place. Trying to figure out how to regulate psychotherapy has been a huge challenge and the transitional council long ago abandoned hopes it would make an April 2013 deadline for establishing the new college.

“We spent two years trying to figure out, who are we regulating? What is the difference between these two titles (psychotherapist and registered mental health therapist)? What kinds of training and education does this very diverse spectrum of practitioners have? What should the requirements of registration be?” said Rowlands.

Psychotherapists will be required to complete 360 hours of supervised clinical training in a program that requires an undergraduate degree. RMHTs will more typically have community college training and 180 hours of supervised clinical work.

For spiritual care the usual standard is four units of CPE leading to specialist certification plus a Master of Divinity, Master of Theological Studies or equivalent degree.

Some psychotherapists have pushed for more stringent requirements — namely a masters degree in psychotherapy or a related counselling discipline, plus time spent in supervised clinical work. The problem with that is there’s only one masters psychotherapy degree in all of Ontario — Wilfrid Laurier University’s MA in theology with a specialization in spiritual care and psychotherapy. It also leaves out Jungian, Gestalt and other kinds of therapists who train in independent institutes that don’t award a masters degree.

However the work is labelled and licensed, O’Brien is convinced it’s necessary work.

“It’s a grace. It’s a satisfaction. Grace is in knowing that somehow I’ve been able to journey along even in a small way with this person who is in great need,” she said.

UPDATED 19 NOVEMBER 2012

JERUSALEM - The Israeli government and leaders of Hamas must make courageous decisions to end the violence that has once again forced residents of Southern Israel into their bomb shelters and residents of the Gaza Strip into their homes, said Auxiliary Bishop William Shomali of Jerusalem.

"We are sad for this escalation. It does not lead to peace but only leads to more violence," Bishop Shomali told Catholic News Service Nov. 16. "This is a vicious circle of violence and (retaliation) is really not the solution. Courageous decisions need to be taken from the part of Israel and also on the part of Hamas not to remain in the circle of retaliation."

He said simultaneous international intervention from Egypt and the United States is needed for the violence to stop.

"Left alone, Israel and Hamas will remain in a circle of retaliation," he said.

"The most important thing is to find a comprehensive solution to the whole Palestinian-Israeli conflict; if not, we will remain with the same retaliations and the same problems," he said.

Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said 120 rockets were fired into southern Israeli communities from Nov. 10 to Nov. 14, when Israel launched air strikes that targeted and killed Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari. More than 90 Palestinians and at least three Israelis had died in the violence as of Nov. 19.

In a Nov. 15 statement, Jerusalem's Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal expressed his deep concern at the escalation, reiterating that violence will not solve the crisis. Only a global solution can find a resolution to the conflict, said a statement from his office.

"In this particular tense context, the patriarch is in solidarity with all victims who are at the center of his thoughts and prayers," the statement said. "He also prays that all those in position of responsibility in this situation do not give in to hate."

Throughout the crisis Zion Evrony, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, was making phone calls to Vatican officials and journalists to explain his country's position.

"The Palestinian people are not our enemy; Hamas and the other terrorist organizations are," he told Catholic News Service Nov. 19. "We deeply regret the loss of life of non-involved civilians."

The ambassador said the Israeli government made "tens of thousands of phone calls" and dropped leaflets in Gaza advising people to stay away from Hamas organization buildings and rocket launch sites before it began its retaliation bombing.

Israel cannot "sit idly by and not respond" when Hamas now has rockets and missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, putting an estimated 3 million people at risk.

The current tension will end, he said, only when Hamas stops firing missiles and rockets into Israeli territory. But in the end, the real solution to the ongoing conflict will have to be "the existence of two states living side by side in peace."

Sami El-Yousef, regional director for the Catholic Near East Welfare Association's Pontifical Mission office in Jerusalem, said he has been in touch with the organization's partners in the Gaza Strip and it appears that Israel is specifically targeting the Hamas leadership, as opposed to the 2008 incursion that involved large-scale destruction of civilian residential areas.

"So far in this early stage we are not seeing the large-scale destruction (we saw in 2008). It remains to be seen if ... it will escalate to much greater damage," El-Yousef said Nov. 16. As many as 1,400 Palestinians died in the 2008 incursion.

He noted that Egypt is also under a different regime, and it is likely that the borders to Gaza will be more open and accessible to moving goods and services and allow people to reach hospitals. After the election of the Hamas government in 2007, Israel blockaded the Gaza Strip, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak enforced the blockade during the 2008 attacks.

El-Yousef said civilians in Gaza rushed to bakeries to buy bread following the assassination of the Hamas leader, and many food stores have run out of supplies. People are under curfew and are very concerned about any possible ground operation escalating the violence.

"The next couple of days will be critical as to where this is heading," he said. "Based on that, we need to assess the situation and decide how to respond."

El-Yousef said he had been in Gaza three weeks earlier and "things were looking up." CNEWA was hopeful that staffers would be able to look at sustainable issues where people could take over their lives and move out of the humanitarian needs, he said.

The situation will continue like this, he said, "unless both sides are willing to take difficult decisions."
He said Israel was wrong to think that if it can get rid of a Hamas leader, the whole organization will collapse.

"There will be someone to replace him ... and they will have to deal with someone much worse. With each possible new person, they are dealing with a more and more extreme leadership, and the likelihood of reaching a solution becomes more difficult," he said. "The cycle gets worse and worse. This is going nowhere and just creating more hatred."

He said he hopes that new leaders in the Middle East might play a positive role in calming things down so that a lasting solution can be found.

"What we have now is conflict management rather than resolution," he said.
- - -
Contributing to this story was Cindy Wooden at the Vatican.

OTTAWA - The federal government is soliciting ideas from the business and charitable sector on how to best solve intractable social problems such as homelessness, hunger and drug abuse.

“Here’s the straight talk: we can’t fund every single, solitary service that people want, without regard for the taxpayers’ ability pay for it,” Human Resources and Skills Development Minister Diane Finley told a group of business and NGO leaders in Toronto Nov. 8.

“It’s time for us to unleash individual initiative so that those who are motivated can help others and those who need help are given the opportunity to take more responsibility to help themselves,” she told the fifth annual Social Finance Forum sponsored by MaRS, a pioneer organization bringing business and NGO leaders together to find innovative ways of tackling social issues.

Finley asked for ideas on how to leverage business and NGO expertise with government funding that would reward measurable results in achieving goals. The government also proposes rewarding “social finance” from the private sector in the form of Social Impact Bonds. These are contracts where the government agrees to pay a charity or NGO an amount of money if agreed upon results are achieved.

“Payment from the government is tied to program outcomes,” Finley said. “If — and only if — the agreed upon outcomes are achieved, the government pays the investors the agreed premium, as well as the original investment.”

Finley announced the launch of a web site to receive innovative ideas for tackling social needs at www.actionplan.gc.ca.

“This is an interesting model,” said Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ) executive director Joe Gunn.

“Will it add anything to what we’re all doing to work against poverty?”

The projects likely to be taken on by the private sector would tend towards those which have more of a possibility of success, leaving behind more difficult projects where, over the short term, it is more difficult to see progress, he said.

Gunn challenged the view government programs do not work in addressing poverty. The CPJ’s Poverty Trends Scorecard — Canada 2012 released in October showed government intervention makes a difference, particularly in rates of seniors living in poverty. A generation ago 30 per cent of seniors lived in poverty, but after government programs targeted this issue, only five per cent of today’s seniors are poor, he noted. Single women with children are also faring better, he said.
It is good that the government recognizes the need charitable organizations and NGOs have for government support in accomplishing their missions, Gunn said, and he would like churches to push for higher levels of taxation to cover the cost.

“Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society and how we care for each other,” Gunn said, noting higher taxes could pay for better home care, pharmacare and other programs to bring about more equity. “I don’t think the private sector or charitable sector can get us there.”

Dave Quist, executive director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC), said Finley’s approach recognizes that charitable organizations can do a better job as they are more specialized in helping the downtrodden. But he warned rates of charity are declining as are rates of volunteerism. Families are under stress trying to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, he said, and parents often don’t have much free time.

Christians differ in how best to address social problems, he said, indicating some concern that big government programs and high levels of taxation have contributed to the decline in private charitable giving and volunteering.

There is a “social gospel” view that looks to generously financed social programs that has prevailed in Canada, he said. Other Christians, such as those who are centreright, support a more capitalist or free-enterprise approach that sees the best solution to poverty in supporting conditions that help people get a good paying job, he said. “We look at the same problem but through different lenses,” said Quist. “The best poverty program is a good job and we see that in family life. When mom and dad have a stable income that family is much more stable; their marriage is much more stable. That doesn’t mean giving them money, but allowing them the dignity of meeting their own needs.”

Many Western countries have realized their generous social programs are not sustainable, he said.