OTTAWA -- On a wet and damp October Thursday on a pathway that goes under a street in downtown Ottawa near the Rideau Centre shopping mall not far from Parliament Hill, a group of people huddled in sleeping bags and blankets to fight off the chill.

Amanda Fellows has seen all too closely how generational poverty keeps perpetuating itself.

OTTAWA – When Sr. Laura Girotto first set foot in Adwa, Ethiopia, in late 1993, it was hard to envision the miracle about to  unfold.

Poverty activists are encouraged by the latest StatsCan numbers showing poverty is on the decline in Canada, but warn that more ambitious programs are needed to end poverty once and for all.

Cardinal Thomas Collins is calling on Catholics to remember the importance of almsgiving this Lenten season.

Winter was settling in and it was a blustery, cold evening as I walked around the streets with Tracey, a survivor of the street who for 14 drug-addled years had called the alleys and drug dens of the downtown area “home.” 

On a recent Saturday morning visit to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a person mummy-wrapped in a dragonfly blue blanket lay motionless a few feet from the corner of Hastings and Main. 

As Ontario courts grapple with the case against the provincial government on basic income, the Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice is reminding Catholics that Catholic social teaching demands society must provide an economic minimum that supports families and human dignity.

It was one of those nights when I was challenged by Pope Francis’ insightful observation in The Joy of the Gospel: “The Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas.”

How young people end up homeless and what happens to them once they’re on the street are basic questions for those who want to end homelessness. 

For several years now, Catholic refugee policy — articulated passionately and repeatedly by the Holy See and many national bishops’ conferences — has focused on the urgent secondary thing, rather than the most important primary thing.

OTTAWA – After 10 years at the helm of Citizens for Public Justice, Joe Gunn, 64, is leaving Feb. 11 to head up the new Oblate Centre at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.