NEWS

{mosimage}OTTAWA - Liberal MP Keith Martin has asked the House of Commons justice committee to hold televised hearings on the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the law that governs it.

{mosimage}TORONTO - It isn’t rocket science, just sweat and elbow grease. But the result is families with a home.

Habitat for Humanity is gearing up for another summer of constructing homes for families who are under-housed — giving parents and their children a place in the community and a secure environment where they can grow up.

{mosimage}OTTAWA - The pro-life movement is the civil rights movement of today. That was the message of the 11th annual National March for Life that drew 7,800 to Parliament Hill May 8.

“We now treat unborn babies like blacks were treated,” Alveda King, the daughter of civil rights activist Rev. A.D. King and niece of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. told a news conference sponsored by the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The Catholic Women’s League (CWL) of the Toronto archdiocese moved to forward resolutions on speeding and poverty to the provincial level at its annual convention held in Richmond Hill.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Fr. Thomas Lynch, a well-known pro-life advocate in Canada, has been appointed national director for Priests for Life Canada, the organization announced May 8.

{mosimage}TORONTO - It’s not a job, it’s a mission. The seven Toronto men ordained to the priesthood May 10 were sent out on their respective missions even before Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins laid hands on them to make them eternally priests in service of the sacrament of the church.

{mosimage}TORONTO-Sudan’s wounded healer is going home. Rather than trying to arrest him, the government in Khartoum is relying on Bishop Macram Max Gassis to build hospitals and schools, dig wells and inspire his people to look more to the future than to a past filled with mass rape, child soldiers, bombings and ethnic cleansing. “We are all traumatized. I am traumatized from the war,” said Gassis.

{mosimage}CHENGDU, China - Chinese priests had to work around disrupted telephone systems and damaged roads as they tried to assess the damage from the May 12 earthquake centred under Sichuan province.

Responding to appeals for aid and prayers on Catholic web sites, Catholics across China have begun donating money and clothes to help survivors, the priests told the Asian church news agency UCA News.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The complaints of peasants and indigenous people in Central America have reached the Toronto Stock Exchange and pushed Goldcorp Inc. off a socially responsible stock index that helps determine at least $33 million in mutual fund investment.

OTTAWA - When Fr. Bryan Bayda got the phone call from the apostolic nuncio (papal ambassador to Canada) telling him that Pope Benedict XVI had appointed him bishop of the Saskatoon Ukrainian Catholic eparchy, he experienced shock and disbelief.