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TORONTO - A lot of people don't know that God is Brazilian, but Scarboro Mission priest Fr. Ron Macdonell has had 26 years of working with indigenous people in the Amazon River basin to learn just how Brazilian God can be.

"Deus é Brasileiro," is a popular saying among Brazilians.

"To me it says that the Brazilians are very close to God and God is their creator. God made them," said Macdonell.

God made Brazilians even if it's hard to say what exactly a Brazilian is. Brazilian identity is a constant puzzle that goes much deeper than soccer and samba, bikinis and coffee.

For a missionary, the question of identity is worked out in faith.

"You can be Catholic in Brazil. You can be Chinese Catholic. You can be Nigerian Catholic. You have to look at what's cultural and what isn't," said Macdonell. "Looking at Brazil, Brazil is a mishmash of all the world's cultures."

Macdonell has lived most of the last 26 years among Macuxi native people in the rainforests of the Amazon, straddling the equator.

Macdonell doesn't think of himself as a missionary to Brazil. Rather, he is a missionary with the Macuxi people. He was living with the Macuxi in the northern Brazilian state of Roraima until the Scarboro Missions called him back this year to serve on its leadership council. Though now based in Toronto, Macdonell will return to his Macuxi community a couple of times a year for extended visits.

The 54-year-old identifies himself as a child of Vatican II, but traces his vocation back to pre-Vatican Council roots in Antigonish, N.S.

"This vision of justice was one feature of the pre-Vatican Church in Nova Scotia — the Antigonish Movement, the co-op credit union movement, Moses Coady and Fr. Jimmy Tomkins. I heard about all that from my parents," he said. "Then the second experience that was formative for me was the Antigonish diocesan priests who were working in Honduras as part of the Church's call to aid Latin America. I would hear about them."

A talent for languages also en- couraged Macdonell's vocation. He isn't just fluent in English and Portuguese. He has of course learned the indigenous languages of Roraima — Macuxi and Yanumami. Japanese was fun to learn. And when he did his PhD in linguistics it just seemed more intreresting to do it in French at Université de Laval in Quebec.

In the context of the Brazilian Church, Macdonell has a very clear sense of the Second Vatican Council as a living and breathing force.

"In Brazil we have a very strong component of the Church that works along social lines and the social Gospel," he said. "Any study of the catechism is not just a call to personal conversion and learning about the Catholic faith. It is also a call to missionary involvement in the local community."

Which means he's not the only missionary when he meets with his Macuxi parishioners. They're all missionaries. The priest's job is to give them the tools and the confidence to be missionaries in their own communities, even their own families.

"So the importance of leadership training is vital. And this is with people who do not have a lot of schooling — perhaps four years of school," he said. "A lot of our work — the sisters and the other priests I work with — is to form teams that will give spiritual training in how to read and interpret the Bible."

Macdonell sees the 19th-century missionaries as driven by sheer numbers of baptisms and the establishment of new parishes. Around the Second Vatican Council the emphasis shifted to institutions — clinics, hospitals, schools, labour centres.

But today's missionaries are focussed on formation so that people can really take ownership of their faith.

"It's sort of an invisible, unmeasurable mission," he said.

There will be no neat statistics that show how confident and wise parish leaders have become. But in regions where there are few priests spread out over huge territory with many inaccessible communities, where Mass is celebrated as little as two or three times per year, lay leadership is essential.

There's more to leading an indigenous Church in Brazil than liturgies and Bible study. People expect the Church to be close to them in their lives.

"We're working with people in poverty, so we're trying to analyse what are the sources of this poverty," said Macdonell.

Whether the issue is local drinking water or rampant alcoholism tearing apart families, groups Macdonell works with expect their religion to help them live a better life. Meetings that start with prayer quickly move on to deal with health, employment and social issues.

Brazil's national conference of Catholic bishops encourages and supports the connections between societal challenges and religion with annual fraternity campaigns during Lent and some 30 pastoral commissions that work on land rights, homelessness, workers' rights, women, ecology and more.

"There's already a structure that has been created within the Brazilian Church that calls people to this engagement, so that their personal faith is lived out in some way," Macdonell said.

As he settles back into life in Canada for a while, Macdonell is aware that at 54 he's one of the younger priests in the Scarboro Missions. He also knows the hope Scarboro Missions once placed in lay missionaries who make three-year commitments has been hard to achieve, with few people able to abandon jobs, families and mortgages.

But he doesn't believe we're living through a twilight for missionary vocations.

"The Church will always produce missionaries and we look to where they are to find them," he said.

"We see people coming to Canada from Asia, from Latin America, from Africa to be missionaries here among us. Our Church is more and more universal. That's where the catholicity comes in. It's a common language."

(UPDATED 17/10/2012)

TORONTO - It’s not common knowledge the Catholic Church in Toronto originally owned a plot of land at the northeast corner of George and Adelaide Streets. At that time in 1806, Toronto, then called York, had a Catholic population of about 37 people. Nor do most people know the chapel built on this spot was taken over by soldiers during the War of 1812. The land was eventually sold in order to buy the property where St. Paul’s Basilica stands today.

“The only research is in the deeds to the land which was bought by a priest and it was recorded there to be left entrusted to the Roman Catholic Church,” said Paul Vaculik, a ROMwalks volunteer tour guide.

On Oct. 7, more than 60 people gathered to take part in the Sacred Stones & Steeples ROMwalks guided tour, led by volunteers of the Royal Ontario Museum. The two-hour walk covered landmark religious buildings in Toronto at the tine of the War of 1812, whose bicentennial takes place this year, as well as general historical factoids as time marched onwards.

Along with the origins of St. Michael’s Cathedral, the tour also stopped at St. James Cathedral, Metropolitan United Church, Mackenzie House, St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church and the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Toronto.

St. Michael’s Cathedral, the oldest church on the tour, was built to accommodate the Catholic population which was growing along with the overall population of Toronto, said Vaculik. St. Paul’s, the first Catholic church in Toronto, was originally fairly small, unlike the basilica Torontonians know today.

“The population really grew because of the famine in Ireland,” he said. “The population of Toronto was 20,000 and, within five months, 38,000 Irish came over.”

Unlike the Anglicans, the Catholic Church’s main base wasn’t the affluent. It was the labourers.

“When they started building around 1847, it was like a barn-raising,” said Vaculik. “A lot of the labourers contributed their labour to building the church so they excavated the land and they started to build the church.”

The base material was ballast material from ships, he added. Bishop Michael Power received a lot of flak for choosing St. Michael’s location, Vaculik said. “It was at the northern end of Toronto and it was starting to get into the boonies, but now it’s well in the heart of Toronto.”

Vaculik also pointed out the often overlooked fact that the galero of Cardinal James McGuigan is hanging above the altar at St. Michael’s Cathedral.

“The tradition was that when the cardinal’s received their hat when they were made cardinals, when they died they would hang their hat up by the ceiling (until) it rotted and fell down.”

This practice has been discontinued, and so, the galero of McGuigan will be the last to hang in the cathedral, he said.

Amidst a backdrop of organ practice, the group was led into the Anglican St. James Cathedral, where a white bust of Bishop John Strachan greeted visitors.

A major influence in Toronto, Strachan played a role in the 1813 surrender of York, negotiating directly with the Americans despite having no official diplomatic authority. In the area of education, Strachan was responsible for establishing King’s College at the University of Toronto.

Unbeknownst to the average churchgoer, the Gothic architecture of the cathedral displays windows in groupings of three to represent the Holy Trinity, said Vaculik.

At Metropolitan United Church, another prominent name in post-secondary education in Toronto is mentioned: Methodist minister Egerton Ryerson.

“Ryerson laid down the framework for the educational system as we know it today,” said Vaculik, including the now standard notion that teachers must complete training colleges.

For more on ROMwalks tours, see www.rom.on.ca/programs.

WINNIPEG - Manitoba’s department of Healthy Living, Seniors and Consumer Affairs has released what it says is Canada’s first spiritual health care strategic plan.

Minister Jim Rondeau said the plan, entitled Health and the Human Spirit, “will promote opportunities for Manitobans to experience spiritual health through better awareness, understanding and healing.”

The four-year strategy was developed in sessions involving a range of community and professional stakeholders, including spiritual care providers, volunteers, counsellors, physicians, psychiatrists, policy analysts and individuals who have experienced spiritual care in a health care context. Rondeau said research has shown that higher levels of spiritual well-being, along with a sense of inner meaning and inner peace, are associated with better health outcomes, lower levels of depression and anxiety and a better quality of life.

Fr. Vince Herner, chair of the Manitoba Multifaith Council and director of spiritual care at the Misericordia Health Centre, said Manitoba “has taken an important step forward with the release of this plan. It sets out a vision and goals for Manitoba and recognizes the increasing awareness that spirituality is an important part of human wellness.”

The plan builds on the province’s previous strategies for spiritual health care, including a province-wide spiritual health care volunteer education course called the Spirit of Caring, core competencies for spiritual health care practitioners and the incorporation of traditional aboriginal healing spaces at a number of health facilities.

The new document states that there is a growing awareness that spirituality, or the way a person searches for and finds meaning, “is part of human wellness and spiritual health care must become part of health care theory and practice.”

It quotes from English authors Mark Cobb and Vanessa Robshaw’s 1998 book, The Spiritual Challenge of Health Care, which concludes, “there is what many people recognize as a spiritual quality to life, which, in suffering, confronts people with questions and possibilities that reach beyond the immediate dilemmas of physical insult.” Also in 1998, the World Health Organization endorsed a proposal to include the word “spiritual” in its description of overall health.

Health and the Human Spirit states that the connections between spiritual beliefs, practices and mental and physical health “are a growing area of research that is finding its way into practice. The discipline of spiritual health care brings together our thinking, beliefs, behaviour and culture to address the many ways human beings seek to be well in body, mind, relationships and soul.”

The authors of Health and the Human Spirit conclude that the four-year strategic plan “enables new understanding, relationships, connections and directions for health care providers to offer quality care based on leading practice.”

A copy of the spiritual healthcare strategic plan is available at the Province of Manitoba’s web site under Healthy Living.

Theology professors and librarians at the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto have a new deal.

After a 10-day break in negotiations, unionized faculty and St. Michael's administration finalized their first-ever labour contract in early October.

"What we ended up with is something that reflects the uniqueness of the University of St. Michael's College and upholds the best of what we have in our sector across Canada," said theology professor Michael Attridge, who participated in the 18 months of negotiations on behalf of 18 members of the faculty association.

The sticking point in negotiations had been how and when the college would declare programs and courses redundant. The union feared a system which would allow administration to unilaterally cancel programs and lay off faculty without regard to tenure. The administration proposal was a threat to academic freedom, Attridge said.

"Tenure and permanent status guarantees the integrity of academic freedom," he said.

Under the new agreement, faculty members will sit on committees that decide when budget realities at St. Michael's require that programs be trimmed. They will also sit on separate committees that decide which programs should be cancelled. Faculty will not have a majority vote on either committee.

"What we've put back in place is the collegiality of the governance of the institution," Attridge said. "Members of our association will participate in that decision making."

Theological faculty association members primarily deliver courses to graduate theology students of the Toronto School of Theology, a consortium of three Catholic and four Protestant theological schools at the University of Toronto. The St. Michael's faculty also teach a small number of undergraduate classes.

A statement e-mailed to The Catholic Register from the St. Michael's College administration called the agreement "a solid working document within which the parties can continue to conduct their collegial relationship."

The agreement covers three years from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2014.

Millions of Africans have food today thanks to $1.8 million Canadian Catholics have given to their development agency.

The federal government will kick in about $1.3 million in matching funds to top up five months of fundraising by the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.

As drought struck the six-country region in May, Development and Peace saw famine on the horizon and began raising money. By August Ottawa stepped in to announce a matching funds program. A final tally of how much of Development and Peace's Sahel region fundraising is eligible for matching funds is pending, but so far the organization has identified approximately $1.3 million that Ottawa should match.

The total Development and Peace commitment in the region comes to almost $8 million, including a $5-million food distribution program the Canadian bishops' development agency is working on with Canadian Foodgrains Bank in three Sahel countries.

In Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Chad and Senegal Development and Peace is working with longstanding partner agencies and the Caritas Internationalis network on seed and food distribution, cash-for-work programs, subsidized food sales and nutrition clinics.

The federal government matching program ended Sept. 30.

VATICAN CITY - On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, published a short reminiscence of the council by Pope Benedict XVI.

In the essay, the Pope recalls his presence at the opening of Vatican II, which he attended as a theological adviser. He both praises and criticizes some of the council's most consequential documents, regarding religious liberty and the Church's relationship with non-Christian religions and the modern world.

The essay is the introduction to a forthcoming collection of previously unpublished council-era writings by then-Father Joseph Ratzinger. The collection will be published in German this November.

"It was a moment of extraordinary expectation," the Pope writes of the procession of more than 2,000 bishops into St. Peter's Basilica Oct. 11, 1962. "Great things were about to happen."

"Christianity, which had built and formed the Western world, seemed more and more to be losing its power to shape society," he writes. "So that it might once again be a force to shape the future, (Blessed) John XXIII had convoked the council without indicating to it any specific problems or programs. This was the greatness and at the same time the difficulty of that task that was set before the ecclesial assembly."

A crucial question for the council fathers, Pope Benedict writes, was the "relationship between the Church and the modern world."

"From the 19th century onward," the Church had "visibly entered into a negative relationship with the modern era," he writes. "Did it have to remain so?"

Pope Benedict concludes that one of the council's best-known documents, "Gaudium et Spes," the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, failed to offer an adequate definition of the "essential features that constitute the modern era."

Instead, he writes, the "encounter with the great themes of the modern epoch" happened in "two minor documents, whose importance has only gradually come to light."

The Declaration on Religious Liberty, "urgently requested, and also drafted, by the American bishops in particular," clarified the Church's affirmation of the "freedom to choose and practice religion and the freedom to change it, as fundamental human rights and freedoms," he writes.

That declaration lent itself to troubling interpretations, the Pope writes, since it might seem to imply the "inaccessibility of the truth to man," which would make religion a merely subjective matter. But he writes that the 1978 election of Blessed John Paul II, from a country where the state denied religious freedom, revealed the "inner orientation of the faith toward the theme of freedom, and especially freedom of religion and worship."

The Pope also praises "Nostra Aetate," the council's declaration that the "spiritual, moral, and socio-cultural values (of non-Christian religions) were to be respected, protected and encouraged."

But the Pope writes that a "weakness of this otherwise extraordinary text has gradually emerged: It speaks of religion solely in a positive way, and it disregards the sick and distorted forms of religion."

In conclusion, Pope Benedict reiterates one of his most prominent teachings about Vatican II: that it must be interpreted in continuity with the Church's millennial traditions, not as a radical break with the past.

"The council fathers neither could nor wished to create a new or different Church. They had neither the authority nor the mandate to do so," he writes. "That is why a hermeneutic of rupture is so absurd and is contrary to the spirit and the will of the council fathers."

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- New evangelization will never be possible without women who are proud and happy to belong to the Catholic Church, the president of the Belgian bishops' conference told the Synod of Bishops.

"Two-thirds of active members of the Church are women," and the primary evangelizers are usually women, "however many women feel discriminated against by the Church," Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard of Mechelen-Brussels told the synod Oct. 9.

"It's high time" the Church better explain why only men may be ordained, he said.

It is not because women are looked upon as being less worthy or able to minister to others, "it's absolutely the contrary," the archbishop said.

The priesthood is open only to men "because the male figure of the priest is a representative of Christ, the groom, who came to wed humanity" through his spouse, the Church, he said.

A male priesthood "is only out of respect for this profound symbol of marriage," Archbishop Leonard said. "Let us remember and remind the Church of her profound feminine nature as the bride of Christ and our mother."

The archbishop spoke forcefully and with emotion, said Basilian Father Thomas Rosica, who briefed reporters about what occurred in the synod hall. The speech was a bit of a "shocker," said one synod participant, because the archbishop is considered to be very conservative.

Archbishop Leonard asked everyone to give thanks for "the quality and the specificity of the massive contribution of women to evangelization."

"Without joyous women who are recognized for all of their qualities" and who are proud of belonging to the Church, "there will be no new evangelization," he told synod participants.

He called on church leaders to "never hesitate to entrust more important roles to women in the life of the Church. We must find new and strong ways to do this," he said.

Synod participants spent the morning session Oct. 10 in small groups divided by language.

In one of the four English-language groups, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York made great efforts to get the three women and four laymen in the group to speak and participate as much as the bishops, according to Father Rosica.

Together with Australian Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Cardinal Dolan "created a mood to speak because there was a little bit of timidity" within the group of 30 English-speakers, said Father Rosica, who is part of that working group.

Cardinal Dolan said it was his first experience at a world Synod of Bishops, and that he was not there just to sit and listen to bishops, but to also tap into the rich experience and expertise of the religious women and laypeople attending as experts or observers who normally do not get a chance to address the larger assembly.

Father Rosica said the initiative was "very well-received" and that one nun told him she was pleased they weren't there "just to sit in the back and listen."

MANCHESTER, England - Catholic leaders in Europe hailed the decision to give a Nobel Prize to two pioneers of adult stem-cell research as a triumph for ethics.

A statement from the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community, known as COMECE, said that awarding the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka represented an "important milestone" in recognizing the superior potential of adult stem-cell research over destructive experimentation on human embryonic stem cells.

The Anscombe Bioethics Centre, an institute serving the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom and Ireland, also described the award as an "achievement of great ethical significance."

"This technique offers hope of progress in stem-cell research without relying on the unethical destruction of human embryos," said David Jones, director of the Anscombe center in Oxford, England.

"The past attempts to clone human embryos and the bizarre experiments to create admixed human-nonhuman embryos have delivered nothing," he said.

"In contrast, the transformation of adult cells into stem cells is making great progress," he continued. "This is science at its best: both beautiful and ethical."

The Nobel committee said England's Gurdon and Yamanaka of Japan had "revolutionized" science through their work.

"These discoveries have also provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine," the committee said.

Both scientists were involved in research into changing mature cells into stem cells, which have the potential to become specialist organ cells and be harvested in the potential treatment of a variety of diseases.

Many hope such work may prepare the ground for therapies to repair heart tissue after heart attacks, for instance, or to reverse the progress of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

Gurdon distinguished himself by using an intestinal sample to clone frogs, and Yamanaka pioneered a technique of reprogramming mature cells to become "pluripotent" by altering their DNA.

In an Oct. 8 statement, COMECE said the award should encourage European Union institutions to switch funding from "ethically problematic and scientifically and economically less-promising" embryonic stem-cell research to non-embryonic stem cell research, which held out greater potential.

"This is an important milestone in recognizing the key role that non-embryonic stem cells play in the development of new medical therapies as alternatives to human embryonic stem cells," the statement said.

"There have been continuing scientific advances in fields of research involving alternative stem cells ... (that) present better prospects for clinical applications; or have indeed already demonstrated widespread clinical results and do not raise any special ethical problems," it said.

"Today's Nobel Prize rewards such efforts to discover alternatives," the statement added.

VATICAN CITY - The Catholic Church needs to use its media and social networks to spread the faith because much of the news media cover the church in a way that "is full of lies," Hungarian Cardinal Peter Erdo of Esztergom-Budapest told the Synod of Bishops.

Across Europe, there is "a spreading ignorance about the Christian faith," which is exacerbated by the media "misinforming the public as to the content of our faith," the cardinal told the synod Oct. 8.

Cardinal Erdo, president of the Council of European Bishops' Conferences, was one of five speakers summarizing the state of evangelization in different regions of the world. Each of the five mentioned the role of the media, and several insisted on the church's obligation to use social networks to reach new generations of Catholics.

The Hungarian cardinal told the synod that Europeans are losing an awareness of just how essential Christianity has been to the development of their cultures, democracy and the human rights they hold so dear. The loss, he said, is a "consequence of an audiovisual culture" in which clear concepts and logical reasoning are ignored.

Mexican Archbishop Carlos Aguiar Retes of Tlalnepantla, president of the Latin American bishops' council, told the synod that since the Second Vatican Council, the Latin American bishops have focused on building community, entering into dialogue with the world around them and educating the faithful about their role in transforming society.

Today, he said, the church must "employ new communications technologies to allow the life and mission of the church to be known and for dialogue with the world." In today's culture, he said, "the social communications media are most influential."

In addition, Archbishop Aguiar said, especially in trying to reach younger people, the church must "make use of social networks to spread Catholic thought and its current answers to cultural challenges."

Young people are searching for meaning in their lives, he said, and if the church is not present in their world with responses, they end up abandoning their search for God.

Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, president of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, told the synod that Asia is experiencing a boom in communications technology. "This is not to be viewed as a threat, but a great gift from God to be used to spread the good news."

The cardinal said the church must help parents, pastors and teachers who can train young people to use the new media and to benefit from them.

Archbishop John A. Dew of Wellington, New Zealand, president of the Federation of Catholic Bishops' Conferences of Oceania, told the synod that even the secular media have helped Catholic evangelization through the attention they have given the declaration of saints from the region.

The examples of local people formally recognized as saints by the universal church "will do more for the new evangelization that we can imagine as the media is interested and captures peoples' imagination," the archbishop said.

If the church wants to find young people, he said, it must use the new media and new gadgets they use. "In these young people we see a sincere and sometimes painful search for meaning and spirituality as they bridge traditional cultural values and the excitement of the technological age with the swipe of an iPad or smartphone."

In addition to looking at the media, the regional reports to the synod touched on almost every area of church life from the importance of the liturgy to the positive impact of immigration, and from the role of new lay movements to the need to support traditional families.

Tanzanian Cardinal Polycarp Pengo of Dar es Salaam, president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, said the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Africa is a challenge to the work of the church on the continent. Catholics must "face the difficulty of dialoguing with the vast majority of good Muslims who, however, are mute, and the small groups of fundamentalists," who are not open to dialogue.

Dialogue also was a key topic in the other regional reports.

Cardinal Gracias said that with Christians making up only 3 percent of the population in Asia and with persecution of Christians not being completely uncommon, "for us in Asia, dialogue is a necessity, not a luxury."

At the same time, he said, many Asian cultures have a deep respect for life -- including for the life of animals and plants -- and it should not be difficult, through dialogue, to help people see that respect for life must include the life of the unborn and the life of their neighbors who belong to a different faith.

Cardinal Erdo said that while "some new (Christian) communities are strongly anti-Catholic," dialogue and cooperation with the Orthodox and Protestant communities is growing. Particularly with the Orthodox, he said, there are joint efforts to address moral and social questions, to protect the traditional family and to defend human life.

Archbishop Aguiar said that dialogue is increasingly important in Latin America as its cultures become more pluralistic. The church's dialogue efforts, he said, must reach out to all sectors of society to share the church's position on issues such as human dignity, and to find ways to build a consensus on how to tackle problems related to education, the economy, migration, justice and peace and the need to protect the environment.

The archbishop agreed with other speakers that Catholics must learn the content of their faith from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but he insisted they also must know Catholic social teaching because they have an obligation to transform society in line with Gospel values.