Five minutes into a recent online retreat, I felt myself going spiritually backwards.

Marian devotion and the Church’s preferential option for the poor come together in the feast of the Visitation, celebrated May 31. The feast marks the beginning of Mary’s three-month visit to her cousin Elizabeth.

Several Ontario Catholic school boards have decided to fly the Pride flag during the month of June. Many officials don’t want to talk very much about it; witness the briefest of stories which appeared in this newspaper.

Seeing as this is the wonderful year of the wonderful St. Joseph, I shall diverge from my usually grim cultural commentary and instead celebrate the greatest saint in Heaven after Our Lady!

What Ottawa won’t do for cats it might end up doing to Catholics, warns a former CRTC vice-chair and leading critic of controversial changes to the federal Broadcasting Act.

“When something grows, it gets bigger, but when it develops, it gets different.” These are the words of ecological economist Herman Daly.

Holding, as an attribute of God, sort of fell out of the sky for me this month. I was looking out the window with wonder at just how many stars we can see without leaving the city in this new-to-us, small(er) city we now call home. As I juggle all the new things, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. The Creator of the Universe is holding time and space in an eternal trajectory.

I read somewhere years ago that one of the great sources of human anxiety is time. Time is too slow or too fast or there is not enough of it. We live on schedules and deadlines that seem to push us harder than we would like or is even healthy.

Premier Christian Radio in the UK just sponsored a survey that investigated how the COVID crisis has affected religious beliefs and attitudes. There were three major findings — namely, that 67 per cent of those who characterize themselves as “religious” found their belief in God challenged, that almost a quarter said the pandemic made them more fearful of death, and that around a third of those surveyed said that their prayer life had been affected by the crisis.

Despite plenty of reasons to believe otherwise, Christianity remains the greatest force in the global push for human equality, human rights and the dignity of the human person.