A suspected pipe bomb thrown through a window at 3:45 a.m. set off sprinklers and filled Brampton’s St. Jerome’s Church with smoke Tuesday, May 29.

There are early reports that one person was treated for smoke inhalation and the bomb squad was called in. Police sent a robot into the church to investigate a suspicious package. The explosive device was put in a secure container to be detonated later.

TORONTO - Ordaining deacons is just like Christmas. It's all about the word made flesh.

"Deacons are ordained to assist the Apostles proclaim the word and make that word a reality," Bishop Vincent Nguyen told 14 men he ordained to the second order of deacons on Saturday, May 26 at St. Michael's Cathedral.

TORONTO - There’s no map to guide foster kids from life in the system to life in the world. But Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and Covenant House think the Ontario government could learn from their experience leading kids through one of the most difficult passages in life.

A report written by foster kids themselves — My Real Life Book based on more than 200 submissions from youth in care — is challenging Ontario’s Ministry of Children and Youth Services to do better for the province’s 8,300 crown wards. Crown wards are in the permanent care of the state in foster or group homes. Another 8,500 kids per year pass through the child welfare system in temporary care.

Agnes Raduly discovered she was diabetic after she arrived in Canada five months ago. She’s one of thousands of Roma from Hungary and the Czech Republic in Canada claiming refugee status, living on less than $1,000 a month, struggling with a new language and a vastly foreign culture.

In mid-May she got a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada telling her that her medication for diabetes won’t be covered by the federal government’s health plan starting July 1. The two pills in the morning and two in the evening are more than she can possibly afford, she said.

TORONTO - The mentally ill occupy the streets of Toronto. They sleep there. They beg. They buy drugs. They rave, cry out in pain and frighten people. They pass through drop-ins, shelters, jails and the emergency wards but somehow almost always wind up back on the same little patch of urban territory.

Seeds of Hope Foundation executive director Kimberly Curry thought there must be something we can do for homeless, schizophrenic women. Sr. Susan Moran, co-founder of Out of the Cold program almost 25 years ago, had the same thought. She never thought giving people a mattress in a church basement one night a week fulfilled our Christian duty.

TORONTO - Msgr. Wayne Kirkpatrick is about to join Toronto's team of bishops with the credentials of a lawman. But he's a canon lawyer who has never forgotten that canon law has a purpose.

"Canon law is very pastoral," Kirkpatrick told The Catholic Register  May 18, the day his appointment as auxiliary bishop was announced. "The law of love is supreme. And that's reflected in our canons. The (1983) Code (of Canon Law) is developed from the teachings of the Second Vatican Council."

The 54-year-old Kirkpatrick studied canon law at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, taking his licentiate in 1990. His studies in canon law prepared him for work as  judicial vicar, chancellor of the diocese of St. Catharines and his current job as moderator of the St. Catharines' curia.

TORONTO - There’s no time like the present, except of course the past. Dominican art historian Fr. Marius Zerafa knows the past and refuses to romanticize it.

“Human nature has remained very much as it was in the Old Testament,” he told The Catholic Register in an interview. The golden age of sacred art was never quite so golden as it’s generally portrayed. Even 450 years ago, cardinals and bishops at the Council of Trent worried over the degeneration, immorality and self-indulgence of contemporary art.

TORONTO - Parishes, food banks, shelters and other services to the poor are going to be hit with bills for garbage pickup in Toronto starting July 1.

They're all part of 1,100 entities that were previously exempt from the garbage fees the city charges to businesses. City Hall will raise an extra $2.9 million per year by 2015 when the new fees are fully implemented.

Banning cluster bombs but then allowing Canadian pilots to drop them, Canadian soldiers to transport them and Canadian commanding officers to order them into the battlefield makes no sense, says the man who negotiated Canada’s participation in the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Former arms treaty negotiator Earl Turcotte, who led Canada’s effort to negotiate the Convention on Cluster Munitions, is warning Canada has misrepresented its signature on the 2010 treaty by proposing enabling legislation with very wide exceptions.

As a researcher, Katherine Bergman has an intense interest in the past. As the new president of St. Jerome’s University, Bergman wants to talk about the future.

Bergman has been studying how southern Saskatchewan went from a giant lake to a semi-arid plain — that is “the transition of the Devonian Elk Point Basin from fully marine to desiccation.”