The adage holds that when supping with the Devil, it’s best to use a long spoon. Current Vatican politics and diplomacy seems to have spun it into Oliver Twist’s: “Please, sir, I want some more.”

While creating the generation that came to life from 1946 to 1964, Canadians were in the midst of the Baby Boom.

Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny deployed a recent lecture in Chicago to drive home the vital point that “pro-life” commitment does not — must not — be limited to opinion and activism around abortion and euthanasia.

Last winter, Quebec Catholics knelt on ice in Arctic weather to celebrate Mass outdoors after the provincial government sealed church entrances without warning.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops got a hot scolding last week from the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec for what the FPJQ called a “deplorable” decision to bar journalists from this week’s plenary meetings.

The commonplace complaint that the Church exists in a post-Christian society tends to misplace the common sense fact that the Church emerged from, and transformed, pre-Christian society.

This week, our magazine Penance and Progress that commemorates and explores Pope Francis’ penitential pilgrimage to Canada is off the press.

Whatever else the Holy Father’s summer visit to Canada produced, hard data show he created fertile ground on which the process of Indigenous-non Indigenous reconciliation can ably proceed.

Following Pope Francis’ peripatetic apology this summer, and as the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation looms at September’s end, it’s safe to foresee increases in Indigenous “adaptations” of Catholic liturgy.

Since 2020 while our attention has been fixed on living through the COVID pandemic, it seems an “end-demic” of medically delivered death has been raging around us almost unnoticed.