Fifteen years ago, on Feb. 12, a 73-year-old nun walked along a rural road in the Amazon region of Para state in Brazil. She was followed by two men with guns — Clodoaldo Carlos Batista and Raifran das Neves Sales. Both men worked for a livestock company. They asked her if she had any weapons. In response she showed them her Bible and began to read, “Blessed are the poor in spirit ….” 

Beauty surprised me last week when I walked out to the car with a small hand in mine: “Mommy, the road is sparkling!” 

Esteemed theological thinkers will doubtless spend the coming months scratching their parses on the latest exhortation from Pope Francis, Querida Amazonia. 

How does tyranny arrive? And what does it look like once it has? At times it comes like a bomb that overturns all existing norms. Think of a military junta or the sudden collapse of order following massive protests and riots.

When I was a young journalist, I joined the Volunteers, a group associated with the Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate (OMMI), a secular institute, and began to take part in their regular discussion groups. Early on, we discussed the five elements of the OMMI spirituality. 

A good friend of mine, a fellow scotch aficionado, sent me a story which is an adaptation of a well-known leadership story, popularized by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. 

Francis Campbell’s column last week about a 200-year-old teapot, a story steeped in family history and faith, brought to mind a three-decade-old tale about another family heirloom.

It’s an impossibly tight deadline that the Trudeau government has deliberately created, but one we must respond to with great urgency. 

It’s true there’s a challenge, to say the least, in seeing the “bigger picture” when the picture’s focus is life and death itself.

We Catholics are at times indifferent about those things that should deeply concern us but obsessed by those things that should be water off our backs.