Love story

Re: Is technology threatening our humanity? (Jan. 17):

My youngest son was born in 2015. On the third day of his life, the geneticist told me that my son was born with Trisomy 21, otherwise known as Down syndrome.

How many times over the past year have you heard the phrases “getting back to normal” and “putting COVID-19 behind us”?

It’s an end-of-March deadline that’s not going to be met. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has failed to deliver on his election promise that public water systems on all First Nations reserves will be potable by March 31, 2021, says Canada’s Auditor General.

We often bemoan the state of the world. A word such a “tragic” is often used. War and famine still plague much of the world and here in Canada we live under an anti-life government. So yes, tragic is fitting.

In many ways, gratitude is the basis of love.

Sometimes, morality is the enemy of justice. Leading a morally upright life should lead one to act with integrity and compassion. Society itself cannot be good unless a critical mass of its people is morally good. But when we try to make other people good and judge them harshly when they don’t live up to our standards, we become repressive.

Since the Daughters of St. Paul have always printed papal encyclicals and works of the popes, we naturally collected and published John Paul II’s extraordinary “Theology of the Body” — a series of catechetical talks he delivered in the early 1980s.

Open doors

Re: Woman granted voting rights for bishops’ synod (Feb. 14):

After reading the article concerning the appointment of Sr. Nathalie Becquart to the general secretariat of the synod of bishops, it made me think of Jennie Trout and Emily Stowe, the first female physicians in Canada, some 140 years ago, and the suffragist movement which very gradually gave the vote to women in Canada.

Two years after his election to the papacy, Pope Francis was asked about how long his pontificate might last. “I have the feeling that my pontificate will be short,” he said. “Four or five years. I don’t know, or two, three.”

This is the 250th anniversary year of the death of St. Marguerite d’Youville, the founder of the Order of Sisters of Charity of Montreal. The first Canadian-born saint, she was canonized in 1990 by St. John Paul II.