The four nuns who arrived in Toronto (population 30,000) on Oct. 7, 1851 had a single task — to care for children orphaned by the typhus epidemic that had ravaged the Irish Catholic immigrant community.

The United States is in the midst of political crisis; divisions among Americans are at a fever pitch. I do not think the country has been this polarized since the Vietnam War era.

After effectively dying briefly three weeks ago, I’ve been thinking whether my survival really means God wants me to remain on Earth for a while yet.

The times they are a-changin’.

Writing in 1962 about anticipated dramatic changes to family, racial, social, political and sexual dynamics, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan warned the old guard that their existing road was rapidly aging and they’d better get out of the way if they couldn’t lend a hand to those driving world change.

Thank you to Winnipeg’s Archbishop Richard Gagnon, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, for daring to state that that a malaise is affecting the Church in this country because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sometimes, even the obvious does not become real until it is named, and Archbishop Gagnon has done that in comments published in last week’s Catholic Register.

Ladies, you’re being lied to. You can’t have it all. (And while we’re at it, all what?) No one can or does “have it all.”

It has been 794 years since St. Francis of Assisi left this Earth, but you can find his fingerprints all over the Pope’s latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti .

Dictionaries offer two definitions for the word beatify. The first is “to make supremely happy.” The second is “a declaration of blessedness” and, for Catholics, this is the step before canonization.

It is 3 o’clock in the morning and my thoughts are too busy for sleep, so I pick up my pen.

This autumn brings a trifecta of anniversaries for those of us devoted to St. John Henry Newman.