Data from two major polling firms show Canadians are nowhere close to the caricature of faith-hostile atheists that we’ve been led to believe characterize us.

It’s been said family can provide us with great strength and expose our greatest weaknesses. Or, as comedian George Burns once said: “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”

“What good can this wretched intolerance and religious bigotry effect?”

Lent gives us two solemn feasts, St. Joseph and the Annunciation of the Lord. Both fell in the last weeks of March, and it is likely that a majority of Canadian parishes did not celebrate both of them; a great many likely celebrated neither.

At the end of the last millennium, gay marriage was not yet a reality and the idea of legalized euthanasia was considered ridiculous. Abortion was of course an issue, but there seemed some hope that the lawless practice would at least become regulated.

The Pope’s recent musings about the possibility of older, married men someday being ordained as priests is all about math, not theology, doctrine or politics.

It was a story that slipped through public consciousness like a shadow, first ominous then quickly evaporated and forgotten.

March 7 is the feast day for Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas — the patron saints of mothers and expectant mothers — and the story of these two courageous martyrs is appropriate to reflect upon.

VATICAN CITY – The Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, Feb. 22, is my favourite day to visit St. Peter’s Basilica.

For many years I have enjoyed a group of Catholic writers who hit their stride roughly in the middle of the 20th century.