TORONTO - The Steubenville Toronto conference gets its “second kick at the can,” said Fr. Frank Portelli, as it follows last year’s successful launch with another highly anticipated conference.

The early evening was warm and the sun had brought out the convertibles with their roofs down and music blaring. I was walking down Jarvis Street and passing Allan Gardens.

TORONTO - The Paulist Fathers don’t want to leave Toronto, they have to. That strange uptick in vocations after the Second World War has now worked its way through the system and there aren’t enough priests left to staff the ambitious little empire of Paulist ministries that once dotted cities across North America. So, after a century in Toronto, the U.S.-based Paulists are going home.

TORONTO - People go to hospital in the hope of feeling better. But if patients are welcomed into a forbidding, institutional room with a strange bed, fluorescent lights and cold, hard floor, what then?

“What are you doing in this bad part of the city?”

I looked around and saw a young man bent over and out of breath, his rollerblade wheels still spinning in the dark of the evening.

He had seen my clerical collar.  The “bad part of the city” he referred to is a Toronto neighbourhood known as “the track,” where prostitution is open and drugs are barely concealed.

TORONTO - For almost 100 years in Toronto, thousands of Sunday worshippers have relied on Sunday only streetcar stops to help get them to church on time.

TORONTO - A simple idea that has helped hundreds of women who face domestic violence and abuse is down to its last few weeks unless Ontario’s provincial government comes up with $70,000 per year to keep it going.

TORONTO - When discussing missionary work, it is easy to picture evangelization in small rural communities in remote corners of the world. However, there is missionary work to be done in big cities as well.

TORONTO - Catholic school trustee Angela Kennedy is accusing some Toronto politicians of conducting “a smear campaign against Catholics.”

TORONTO - On a large campus like the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, it can be hard for students to feel a sense of community. So the Newman Centre’s Student Campus Ministry (SCM) team is going out to let Catholic students on campus know it is there for them.

TORONTO - In Toronto’s west end a long-forgotten, paved-over cemetery has been unearthed on the grounds of St. John the Evangelist Church.

TORONTO - For the season’s finale the Toronto Argonauts started their faith-filled quarterback Trevor Harris who led the team to a 23-5 victory against Ottawa, fittingly on Faith Night. 

TORONTO - It’s Out of The Cold season in Toronto. That means thousands of volunteers working in church basements, mosques and synagogues over the cold winter months to keep the homeless safe. 

TORONTO - “Historians don’t use right or wrong. Catholics do, but historians don’t,” said Catholic Holocaust scholar Suzanne Brown-Fleming.