October will be a listening time for Catholics worldwide as the Synod on Synodality rolls on in Rome.

After last week’s Canada-wide street protests pitting parental rights advocates against transgender champions, context can be illuminating. Light can be shed, for example, by recalling the way activists and strategists for the gay rights movement employed a brilliantly effective two-tiered tactical approach to gain victory in the pursuit of same-sex marriage a quarter century ago.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is urging left-leaning activists to sharpen their listening skills if they want public support. Pray the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association gets the message.

Elsewhere on this page, the Migrants and Refugee section of the Dicastery for Human Development describes human trafficking as a “gruesome criminal business” and an “evil trade.” Then it adds the word that illuminates in a sentence the reason The Catholic Register spent time, energy and our generous donors’ contributions for this week’s special supplement on human trafficking.

Among the many compelling truths found in this issue’s special section on healing and recovery is the reality that so-called process addictions can be as real and destructive as habitual substance abuse.

Canada’s Federal Court may have unwittingly brought us to peak gender pronoun nonsense. We can only hope — or better yet pray — for a return to earth it puts our feet back on sensible ground.

In the deep mists of mid-20th century Quebec political mythology there glowered a tribe of hybrid juggernaut-Amazonian English-speaking women popularly known as “Speak White” Eaton’s counter clerks.

The contemporary political and cultural mood demands recall of what would normally be a blinding statement of the obvious in a liberal democracy: expression is not automatically endorsement.

A pithy truth attributed to G.K. Chesterton is that the proof of Original Sin is evident on every city street and the front page of the daily newspaper.

In Pope Francis’ June 29 homily at the Mass bestowing the liturgical vestment called a pallium on Toronto’s Archbishop Leo and his fellow new metropolitans, he emphasized the primacy of immediacy, evangelization and followship in Catholic life.