Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Actually, it was Plato who argued that “our need will be the real creator,” a comment that eventually morphed into our more familiar adage.

The first responsibility of a journalist is to get the facts right. In that regard, I failed in my column “Lack of transparency shatters credibility” in the Oct. 17 Catholic Register. In that article, I took Canada’s bishops to task for failing to meet their responsibility to live up to agreements to provide healing and reconciliation to the survivors of residential schools.

Are you “hopelessly devoted”? No, not to your crush, your boyfriend/girlfriend or spouse, but to the Most High God?

She was only 16, a child by all accounts, and she had been sent to the big city from her home in northern Canada for treatment at a mental health clinic.

The board of a hospice society in suburban Vancouver is fighting for its pro-life life this October. It is also already looking ahead to new life for palliative care in a continent-wide network of euthanasia-free care centres.

In Judeo-Christian terms we speak about the notion of abetting evil. A Catholic doctor will not only refuse to perform euthanasia but will not refer the patient to someone who will. The referral is a form of abetting evil; paving the way for the act to happen.

Store displays and front lawns are filling up with skeletons, ghosts and all things ghoulish in preparation for Halloween, a favourite occasion among most children.

Thanks is a word and a way of being. It seeks out the gift in what is. It assumes there is a gift to be seen here. In the hardest seasons of my life, thanks has been a ladder out of darkness. A therapist once reminded me through my tears that what we focus on is magnified. When we actively practise gratitude, the gifts of the present become easier to see.

Are you struggling with the rosary? Struggling with praying the rosary? You are not alone. Many Catholics feel super guilty for not praying the rosary very much or at all.

The doctrine of the Trinity provides the clearest insight into the nature of God as love as well as into the fullness of the human person. Christianity is best understood in the light of three divine persons who are infinite, overflowing love. Society could benefit enormously if it understood God as trinitarian love and our call as that of living in light of such love.