As the Ontario bishops completed their ad limina visit to Rome last week, I couldn’t help but recall one of my favourite stories about one of Ontario’s favourite bishops.

Whether opening a free laundromat for the homeless in Rome or shunning the palatial papal apartments in the Vatican, Pope Francis knows the power of symbolic messages.

On April 29, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy (OLSWA) will graduate the first class of its newly approved bachelor’s degree program.

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.