TORONTO - The thought of a chalice or paten made in a sweatshop, of chasubles sewn by child labour or religious statues that come out of a factory that dumps heavy metal in a river, killing the fish, would be distinctly uncomfortable for most Catholics.

The church in Canada helps fund the Maquiladora Solidarity Network and KAIROS, organizations that have demanded that major clothing retailers and manufacturers disclose their supply chains so anyone can find out whether a shirt or a pair of athletic shoes was made in a sweatshop. The church has spoken out against abusive working conditions since Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891.

Is marriage becoming a threat to religion? As more Canadians marry outside of their faith, religious leaders are starting to worry about how the children of interfaith marriages will ever gain a religious identity.

TORONTO - Failure to reduce Canada's 17-per-cent child poverty rate over the past five years is creating a deficit that can't be erased by paying down government debt, say the authors of Campaign 2000's 2006 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty.

TORONTO - Following St. Francis into Advent starts with a concrete, physical, tangible, searingly real sense of the incarnation, according to Toronto-area Franciscans who will spend the four weeks leading up to Christmas doing things most Catholics do — preparing a Christmas crèche, attending Advent liturgies, singing carols and getting ready for the Feast of the Nativity.

TORONTO - The seemingly endless debate about private versus public health care in Canada naturally lends itself to a Catholic take, bioethicist Bridget Campion told a small audience at the end of an evening in which the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute split the podium between pro-medicare family doctor Claudette Chase and pro-private sector economist John Kyle.

The Israelites of biblical times could never have predicted that a couple thousand years down the road nations would face off against each other with weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands all at once. But they did know about arms races, and they knew about the relationship of small nations with great empires.

When Canada was a nation of just 11.3 million it saw 45,300 of its young men die in the Second World War, just one generation removed from the 66,665 men who died in the Great War.

A legacy is a powerful idea, a way to project the values, hopes and ideals a person has struggled for in this life out into the future, beyond their own life span.

People might think of accountants as the guys with sharp pencils who keep the money safely in their clients’ pockets, but a chartered accountant might also be the ideal person to talk to about emptying those pockets.

TORONTO - A gift of $15,000 is probably a lot easier to make if a $6,000 tax break goes along with it. That’s the new economics of giving stocks and bonds to charity, and it likely explains why the archdiocese of Toronto has received more donations of securities this year than in the last three years combined.