The Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats are in agreement on maintaining Ontario’s public funding for two education systems: public and Catholic.  One key question I still have today: why should Catholics get full funding and no other religious groups get any public support?

Dr. Shiraz Dossa, a Muslim professor of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., protests a little too much. In an essay published in the June issue of the Literary Review of Canada , he accuses his Roman Catholic employer of authorizing “a small Spanish Inquisition” and sanctioning “a crusade against a Muslim Holocaust scholar” (that would be Dossa).

Nobody likes to wait. Especially for a medical diagnosis and treatment.

That’s what my husband and I were doing this past month.

The suffering imposed on Christians by the Communist regime of the now-vanished Soviet Union was one of the tragedies of the tormented 20th century. The clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church were humiliated and co-opted by the Stalinists. Scandalized by the compromises of the Moscow patriarchate with Communism, many Russian Orthodox believers in exile cut themselves off from their mother church in the 1920s, initiating decades of hostility and suspicion on both sides.

It’s difficult to comprehend why Amnesty International has persisted in going down the dark path toward embracing abortion as a human “right.” Yet it has done so, despite entreaties around the globe from both its members and friends outside the organization.

If you want to find a cipher for society’s attitude toward the Roman Catholic priest, look to the priest figure in fiction and popular culture.

All those letter-writing campaigns and petitions do occasionally hit their mark. Recent evidence can be found in the growing tide of opinion against the current mega-fashion of buying bottled water.

{mosimage}The recent visit to Canada of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to meet with the Anglican bishops across the country was an effort to counsel the bishops on preserving the unity of the communion.

Is the current challenge to Ontario’s publicly funded Catholic education system a tempest in a teapot? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Regardless, there is never a time when Catholics can be complacent about their cherished separate schools in Ontario, or anywhere in the country.

St. Paul’s splendid image of the church as the Body of Christ reminds us that all Christians suffer when even the smallest part of the Body is injured. It is this New Testament insight into the nature of the church that explains, at least in part, the pain and concern felt among Christians everywhere about our persecuted Christian brothers and sisters in Turkey.