Features/Features

{mosimage}TORONTO - Before the lunch hour rush, chef Scott Vivian prepares locally grown leeks to accompany his slowly braised short ribs from a Bradford, Ont., farm.

Vivian, executive chef of Jamie Kennedy on the Gardiner restaurant atop Toronto’s Gardiner Museum , is an advocate of the international Slow Food movement which has been picking up steam in Canada. Its Toronto-based chapter has grown from five volunteers to more than 200 in six years, joining the 100,000-strong Slow Food movement in some 150 countries.

Slow Food movement supporters believe that access to good, clean, fair food is “an irrevocable human right.” Carlo Petrini started the movement in 1986 as a grassroots protest against fast food and the lifestyle it came to represent.

{mosimage}TORONTO - “Nobody’s a nobody,” Dr. Andrew Simone, founder of the non-profit Canadian Food for Children , told more than 80 students, education assistants and teachers at the Catholic Education Centre.

Everyone is a gift from God, Simone said in his talk, part of the kick off event of the Toronto Catholic District School Board’s 15th annual Respect for Life Week.

{mosimage}During the past 15 years that he spent searching through boxes and files in a basement room at Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ont., volunteer archivist Steve Catlin has come across many surprises.

One day he found a box marked “director’s box.” Inside, among what seemed to just be odds and ends, he found two pieces of burnt wood. Research revealed that these were remains of two posts excavated from St. Ignace II, the place where Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were martyred.

{mosimage}TORONTO - An upcoming provincial code of conduct for school trustees will include sanctions for those who don’t abide by the new rules, says Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne.

“Having a code of conduct in place makes sure that everyone’s clear about what their roles and responsibilities are and should help if there were future situations of that kind,” Wynne told The Register after a May 9 speech at the annual general meeting of the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association.

{mosimage}After the doors close at St. Mary’s Elementary School in Hamilton, Ont., Grade 8 student Joana Sampaio will swing by the school’s playground to meet up with the friends she first met in Kindergarten.

It will be a chance for them to reminisce about their time at St. Mary’s.

{mosimage}TORONTO - When principal Angelo Bolotta makes his usual morning rounds down the hallway, he greets each student he meets by name.

It’s this community spirit, he says, that helps Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts students excel.

The school for Grade 7 to 12 students ranks as the top Catholic school in Toronto in the Fraser Institute’s latest report card on Ontario high schools.

{mosimage}TORONTO - When nine-year-old Erica Martin and her friends take a break from playing in the schoolyard, they sit down on the yellow gas pipes along the side of the yard.

But as the weather gets warmer, the St. Brigid Elementary School students say resting on the metal pipes isn’t exactly a good idea.

“Students need shade. Sometimes it gets too hot,” said nine-year-old Erica.

{mosimage}TORONTO - As they swing through North America drumming up interest and financial support for Bethlehem University , Br. Jack Curran and Br. Peter Bray of the Christian Brothers warn against any hard and fast convictions about who is right and who is wrong in the Middle East.

“To be pro one side or the other side is simplistic,” said Curran, the vice president for development at Bethlehem University. “But there has to be a truth some place in the middle.”

Tiny Bethlehem University, with less than 3,000 undergraduates and a sprinkling of graduate programs leading to masters degrees, isn’t going to singlehandedly find that truth and light the path to peace — but it has a role to play, said Bray.

{mosimage}TORONTO - We’re sorry, ask for your forgiveness and hope you will trust us again.

That was the message from 12 Toronto Catholic District School Board trustees in a public apology.

“Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the embarrassment, anxiety and frustration we have caused to the school communities, our staff and Catholic ratepayers for our actions, lack of actions and mistakes,” the trustees said in a May 1 statement.

{mosimage}There’s plenty of blame to go around in the furor at St. Jerome’s University , and it’s going to take the Christian value of forgiveness to get the small, Catholic liberal arts college back on track, according to a consultant who spent two months investigating the university’s troubles.

“The Gospel values that are included in the mission statement are a very good reference point for everybody in this particular exercise. Some part of that involves good Christian value of forgiveness,” Ken Snowdon told The Catholic Register.