NEWS

TORONTO - Canada's twin goals of military success and humanitarian aid in Afghanistan are doomed to failure, the president of Caritas Internationalis told The Catholic Register as he visited the international aid network's Canadian partner.

What health means will be thoroughly examined by the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute at its 2007 conference in Halifax this coming May.

WINNIPEG - The first province to impose minimum labour standards for the clothes its government buys is Manitoba.

A year after they were snatched from the streets of Baghdad and repeatedly threatened with death over 118 days, the surviving three members of a kidnapped Christian Peacemaker Teams have forgiven their kidnappers and asked the Iraqi court to show leniency to the men about to stand trial for the crime.

HAMILTON, Ont. - For the past 14 years the Good Shepherd food bank in Hamilton transforms into a Christmas Store for the month of December.

TORONTO - Catholic Family Services — Peel-Dufferin delivers one of the best bargains the Ontario taxpayers ever got.

The agency deals with family breakdown, the after-effects of child abuse, violence against women and more among 1.2 million people living west and northwest of Toronto. For the region's adult survivors of child abuse, the agency collects $53,000 of provincial government funding and magically transforms it into $250,000 in front-line counselling services to some of the most tragically damaged people in our midst.

OTTAWA - Canada's Catholic bishops say the marriage debate is not over, despite the "disappointing" loss of a House of Commons motion to restore the traditional definition.

Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic presided over his last noon Mass at St. Michael’s Cathedral as archbishop of Toronto Dec. 17, using the occasion to thank all those who had worked with him and for him.

A new archbishop has been appointed to the Archdiocese of Toronto. Pope Benedict XVI announced Dec. 16 that he has called on Archbishop Thomas Collins of Edmonton to take the place of the retiring Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic.

Collins, 59, told The Catholic Register in a telephone interview from Edmonton that he was "very, very honoured by the confidence the Holy Father had in me" to become the 12th bishop of Toronto, which was established in 1842.

 

TORONTO - The 2007 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was fired in the crucible of AIDS in Umlazi district, near Durban, South Africa.