Canada joined an exclusive international club last month, but there is no reason to brag.

There’s nothing like a feel-good story to kick off a new year, and stories seldom get more uplifting than a dramatic rescue involving a teenage girl who feared for her life.

My plan had been to write this week on the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul’s encyclical The Splendour of Truth, the sainted pope’s most controversial document. However, as often happens, events intervened and I put off writing that reflection. Maybe next time.

VATICAN – Meeting with a top Muslim leader in Saudi Arabia, the Vatican's chief interreligious dialogue official called for the equal treatment of people of all religions, saying discrimination and double standards based on religious affiliation only increase Islamophobia and Christianophobia.

DEAD SEA, Jordan – Arab Christians voiced hope and concern over U.S. President Donald Trump's first foreign visit and his speech in Saudi Arabia to the Muslim world, in which he urged a peace-focused Islam as a counter movement to extremism.

OTTAWA - A call by an influential Saudi sheikh to destroy all churches on the Arabian Peninsula has led the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Human Rights Committee to voice its concern to the government of Saudi Arabia.

In a May 30 letter to Saudi Ambassador Osamah Al Sanosi Ahmad, Bishop François Lapierre, chairman of the CCCB’s Human Rights Committee, referred to a March 12 statement by Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, who said: “only one religion,” Islam, “should exist in the Arabian Peninsula” and thus “it is necessary to destroy all churches in the region.”