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

ROME – After weeks of confusion and consternation, Rome's mayor told the Vatican newspaper that Rome Caritas would benefit not only from the coins tourists throw in the Trevi Fountain, but from coins tossed in any of the city's historic water features.

ROME – Most of the tourists who have tossed coins over their shoulder into Rome's Trevi Fountain over the past 20 years probably did not know that they were helping the city's poor.

KYENJOJO, Uganda – Not all that long ago, family members and residents of this small town in western Uganda mourned the loss of Sarah Baguma, who was stabbed to death by her husband in a domestic wrangle.

Welfare reforms that leave a big gap between the poverty line and being poor enough to receive benefits could end up forcing Church charities to make up the difference for thousands of disabled and marginally employable Ontarians.

“The poor you will always have with you.” Prophetic words of Jesus 2,000 years ago. 

Christmas may come but once a year, but at the Furniture Bank they keep their eyes and ears open to the season year-round.

As Toronto’s city-run shelter system bulges with refugees and migrants, volunteer-run Out of the Cold programs are operating at capacity and wondering when governments are going to get serious about housing.

EDMONTON – A single mother, without a home, sits in a McDonald’s restaurant on Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue strip.

VATICAN – As the rich get richer, the increasing misery and cries of the poor are ignored every day, Pope Francis said.

In 2006, after 20 years of stellar work with the Out of the Cold program to shelter the homeless, its co-founder was not impressed.

It is noble to mark the World Day of the Poor with gifts of charity, but Pope Francis has challenged Catholics to go much further than that. He asks us to observe Nov. 18 by making a serious examination of conscience “to see if we are truly capable of hearing the cry of the poor.”

People around the world are poor for a lot of different reasons. 

When Pope Francis initiated the World Day of the Poor to be marked on the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time — Nov. 18 this year — it was easy for people to see this targeted at the familiar pictures that are all too real of Third World poverty.

The world commemorated the United Nations’ International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Oct. 17, but you could be forgiven for not noticing.