Reading through Pope Francis’ fascinating 12,000-word interview in the Jesuit journal America Magazine, many thoughts and sentences leapt out, especially this one.

A day after at least 85 Christians were murdered at a Peshawar church, thousands of protesters spilled into Pakistan’s streets to demand justice and protection. Their cries for help followed a particularly bloody weekend for Christians who, in addition to enduring persecution in places like Syria, Iraq and Egypt, were among those targeted by Muslim terrorists in a mall massacre in Kenya that caused dozens of deaths.

The Kenyan city of Mombasa is an ancient metropolis that bears the marks of its long history as a melting pot of civilizations, religions, cultures, races and nationalities. It is the gateway to East Africa and the coastal city of choice for many tourists from Asia, Europe and North America.

It’s something you never want to hear. You’ve believed and clung to something your entire life, something you stake your very existence on. Then someone suggests it’s all bunk, irrelevant, meaningless.

Readers will indulge me, I trust, if I write again about Msgr. Thomas Joseph Raby, whose funeral was held last week in Kingston. It does not seem excessive to spend another week on his memory.

Only in an age permeated with paradox could the victories of the gay rights movement present a model for religious believers in the public square. Yet whether one agrees or disagrees with what gay activists have achieved over the past 40 years, there is no doubt the strategic course they have followed has been wildly successful and worth emulating as a result.

A month ago Canada’s new ambassador for religious freedom called on Iran to stop persecuting followers of the Baha’i faith, the country’s largest religious minority. Citing Canada as a leading defender of religious freedom, Andrew Bennett urged “the regime in Iran to live up to its human rights obligations and to respect the voices, thoughts and beliefs of all Iranians.”

The other day I had a “Count Your Blessings” type of day. It was courtesy of two friends; a new friend and a long-time friend.

Thomas Joseph Raby — T.J. to his closest friends, always Mgsr. Raby to me — died a few weeks shy of his 95th birthday. Msgr. Raby was born on Oct. 1, and it pleased him that his birthday was the feast of the Little Flower. It is a measure of the length of his years that when Msgr. Raby was born in 1918, St. Therese did not yet have a feast day. She was not beatified until 1923, nor canonized until 1925. Indeed, Msgr. Raby was born during the First World War.

It took the deployment of chemical weapons to fully awaken the world to the war horror that has stalked Syria for 2 1/2 years. Now global leaders must forcefully react, not with missiles, but with an immediate and profound assault on the humanitarian crisis that is destabilizing the region and raining immense suffering on millions of innocent Syrians.