As a native American, a Catholic and someone who still clings to the notion that character matters, I have found someone who is worthy of my vote. Abe Lincoln is not on the U.S. presidential ballot but I will write in his name.

Bishops in Alberta and the Northwest Territories issued what has been prosaically called a series of guidelines to deal with so-called medical aid in dying. In truth, the Vademecum for Priests and Parishes beautifully illuminates, and reminds readers, what it means to live a Catholic life.

Is music part of the missionary activity of the Church? Or does it remain part of her internal life, as it were, reserved to the worship of God?

Reading through the obituary recently of iconic Canadian author and baseball lover W.P. Kinsella, one paragraph jumped off the pages of the Globe and Mail; dripping with irony.

I believe the heart of our faith is forgiveness. Even when receiving the Eucharist we are reminded that on the cross, in His great agony, Jesus forgave.

The great Canadian author William Kinsella died Sept. 16 at the age of 81. He wrote terrific stories and was brilliant at merging baseball and fiction. His novel Shoeless Joe was turned into the hit movie Field of Dreams. He left behind a great literary legacy and a gaping hole in the hearts of baseball fans with a literary bent.

This week Toronto hosts the head of the largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC). Within the UGCC, Shevchuk is referred to as the Patriarch of Kyiv, the common title for the head of an Eastern Catholic Church. Due to tensions with the Orthodox though, especially in Russia, the Holy See grants him the title of “major archbishop,” equivalent in all aspects to a patriarch.

Each year, there are more than 5,000 heart transplants around the world — that’s about 14 every single day.

When Canada legalized assisted suicide earlier this year, the National Post’s coolly analytical Andrew Coyne wondered in a column whether we haven’t lost our way as a country. Barely two months after the legislation’s passage, a marker of how lost we are shows up in our insistence on going both ways at once.

When discussions about Catholic fiction arise certain names are always mentioned: J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton and so forth. Even C. S. Lewis comes up, even though he was a member of the Church of England.