TORONTO - Big families, big dreams, big faith and big love all came together  at St. Michael's Cathedral May 12 for two men chosen from the Catholic faithful for a lifetime of service to the sacraments and the body of Christ.

Francesco Marrone, a 30-year-old originally from Verona, Italy, and Chris Lemieux, a 40-year-old from Georgetown, Ont., received holy orders at the hands of Cardinal Thomas Collins, the archbishop of Toronto, before 1,000 people on a sun-drenched spring Saturday morning.

TORONTO - There’s a lot to sing about in the revised Roman Missal, and hundreds of Catholic musicians plan to do just that at Toronto’s Annuciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish on Pentecost Sunday.

By late April, the Office of Lay Formation had already signed up more than 200 musicians for a May 27 Mass with Cardinal Thomas Collins. The Mass will celebrate the last year spent preparing for and then implementing new Mass texts musically. Registration for the event will be open right up until the baton drops for the entrance hymn, said Lay Formation executive director Bill Target.

TORONTO - The long, hard national look at Canada’s history of the Indian residential schools comes to Toronto May 31 to June 2.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is supporting a regional event at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre Hotel. The three days will give Toronto-area First Nations’ people a chance to learn about the history of residential schools and an opportunity to share personal stories about the residential school experience and how it has affected families.

A house is just a big container. It’s what you put in it that makes it a home. The St. Vincent de Paul Society at St. Kevin’s in Val Therese, Ont., knows the difference.

The Vincentians inspired parishioners at St. Kevin’s and their fellow Vincentians around the province to contribute $24,000 to help furnish pre-fab houses going to the native community of Attawapiskat, Ont.

As famine grips West Africa the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace is calling for donations so it can help its partners in the region distribute emergency food supplies and organize communities to prevent further deaths.

“This crisis has the potential to spiral into a major humanitarian catastrophe if we don’t act now,” said Development and Peace executive director Michael Casey.

TORONTO - There’s only one union in Ontario demanding layoffs, willing to accept a wage freeze and hoping to be declared obsolete. The brand-new Freedom 90 Union of Food Bank and Emergency Meal Program Volunteers launched its demands at a downtown Toronto church May 7.

The Freedom 90 group of middle-aged and elderly veteran volunteers of Ontario’s food banks are asking Ontario’s government to “make Ontario’s food banks obsolete — before we volunteers reach the age of 90.”

TORONTO - As Chinese and U.S. diplomats sought a resolution to the diplomatic crisis surrounding Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, many Chinese-Americans turned their attention to the nature of Chen's dissent.

Without challenging any fundamental tenet of China's constitution or its 1949 revolution, Chen has focused attention to the country's forced abortion and sterilization practices, leading to a crackdown by the government on his movement and prohibitions on contact with foreigners and the media.

TORONTO - Africans still want the kind of genuine partnership with Canadians the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace has fostered over the last four decades, the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Eastern Africa said — even if CIDA has cancelled funding to every D&P partner in Africa outside of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"It matters," Fr. Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator told The Catholic Register. "It's not only about Canadians giving to Africa. There's an element of mutuality there. It's not just about the money. It is important to keep that contact."

TORONTO - Nobody has a PhD in dying. There are no courses to teach us how to die well. But we all want a good death.

It’s getting harder to die well. We live in a world where death happens somewhere else to somebody we don’t know who is surrounded by machinery. Few of us have been present at a death bed in our own homes.

Medicine often makes it even harder.

At first it seemed only Italians could possibly care about petty office politics in the Vatican. But three months into the Vatileaks scandal, non-Italians are beginning to wonder.

The Vatican raised eyebrows when in late April Pope Benedict XVI established a three-cardinal commission to investigate a series of leaks of letters exchanged among Vatican officials and between these officials and the Pope himself.