In its annual report on Catholic missionaries murdered during the year, the Vatican-based news agency, Fides, noted what many of them had in common was living a normal life in areas where violence had become common.

Mike MacDonald feels “like the most blessed Canadian in the world.” Formerly an educator in the Calgary Catholic School District, MacDonald has lived most of the past three decades in southern Mexico.

Most of the 18 Catholic missionaries murdered in 2022 were not carrying out high-risk missions when they were assassinated but were simply "immersed and submerged in the ordinariness of their lives and their apostolic work," said the editor of Fides, the Vatican's missionary news service.

CLEVELAND -- Ursuline Sr. Dianna Ortiz was teaching Indigenous children as a missionary in Guatemala in 1989 when her ministry was torn apart in the midst of the country’s brutal civil war.

A Canadian missionary who, just an hour before the soldiers committed their crime, came face-to-face with men who raped and murdered four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980, is urging Canadians to remember the martyrdom of both the American missionaries and the Salvadoran people.

When I was a young journalist, I joined the Volunteers, a group associated with the Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate (OMMI), a secular institute, and began to take part in their regular discussion groups. Early on, we discussed the five elements of the OMMI spirituality. 

BANGKOK -- Missionaries are not mercenaries, but beggars who recognize that some brothers and sisters are missing from the community and long to hear the good news of salvation, Pope Francis told the Catholics of Thailand.

WASHINGTON -- No one can deny that the act was horrific. Six priests found face down on a lawn with bullet holes through various parts of their bodies. One was in his bathrobe.

OTTAWA – Br. Leonardo Rego saw his vision come to life when the Centre Oblat — A Voice for Justice officially opened at Saint Paul University on Feb. 15.

EDMONTON – A group of young Catholic missionaries is getting a reality check of what life is like in the North.And they’re bringing their gifts and testimonies to the youth who need it most.

VATICAN – Proclaiming the Gospel is not the same thing as proselytism and often means simply being a neighbor and friend to someone while living an authentically Christian life, Pope Francis said.

VANCOUVER – Three Vancouver women have left career and school behind to serve the homeless.

At 60, Fr. Ron MacDonell is the youngest of the Scarboro Missions priests. Even as his fellow priests back home in Toronto move into a seniors’ residence, MacDonell is working today in the upper reaches of the Amazon basin among Brazil’s Makushi people, bringing together village elders and young people to recover their vanishing language and culture.

VATICAN – In their first formal reports to the entire Synod of Bishops, many of the gathering's working groups reported that they had discussed the clerical sexual abuse crisis and, especially, its impact on young Catholics.

Thanks to the excellent coverage by Salt + Light Television, I was able to follow the “Catholica 200” celebrations in St. Boniface, Man., marking the bicentennial of the arrival of the first French missionaries in the Canadian West.