{mosimage}It’s 2 a.m. It is that time of the day when a man filled with stress lays in his bed staring at his alarm clock. I ask Jesus to help me sleep, but sleep doesn’t come.  

{mosimage}In April, after four Canadian seal hunters were killed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence when their ship capsized while being towed, the animal rights activist Paul Watson provided a provocative quote. Speaking for his organization, which engages in direct action to protest abuse of marine wildlife, he said: “The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society recognizes that the deaths of four sealers is a tragedy but Sea Shepherd also recognizes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups is an even greater tragedy.”

{mosimage}The release of the Bouchard-Taylor report May 22 on reasonable accommodation of religious and ethnic differences in Quebec offered a useful corrective to some of the alarmism creeping into public debate on this issue. As one of the first official and systematic examinations of how Canadians integrate newcomers into our midst, it holds valuable lessons for all of us.

{mosimage}No one says being an Ontario Catholic school trustee in these times is easy. The vast majority of trustees recognize, too, that theirs is a vocation with few rewards and a grinding workload. So the temptation to ease that burden in questionable ways may be understandable — even as succumbing to it is never acceptable.

{mosimage}The residential towers now sprouting up across downtown Toronto regularly rouse the ire of citizens. People don’t like these structures for all kinds of reasons: because they cast long shadows, because they increase local traffic, because they make bad fits with the often low-rise neighbourhoods that surround them. But until now, I’ve never heard people objecting to a high-rise development because it threatens to eat up a parking lot.

{mosimage}As a Lenten discipline, I re-read the earliest documents of Christianity, namely the letters (or Epistles) of St. Paul. It is easy to forget that when Paul wrote these letters there were no Gospels, nor anything else of what today we call, with easy familiarity, the New Testament. My purpose was to see if, across two millennia, St. Paul’s authentic voice could still be heard.

{mosimage}Economists — practitioners of the “gloomy science” — are gleefully telling us the party’s over. The boom times have disappeared, pffft, into thin air, replaced by recession and unemployment. But statisticians are now saying that most Canadians were not even invited to the party to begin with.

{mosimage}At last, the food crisis now afflicting millions of the Earth’s poorest people has caught the attention of the well-off nations of Europe and North America. One has to wonder whether we would have ever woken up had not riots and protests broken out earlier this year in a dozen countries across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.

{mosimage}To many, the electoral crisis in Zimbabwe is a case of a greedy dictator and his ruling party refusing to give up power to a democratically elected opposition. Zanu PF and president Robert Mugabe have led the nation since independence from Britain in 1980.

{mosimage}Last month Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit as Pope to the United States of America. Many were concerned about the impact the German Pope would have on a rather beleaguered church. They asked if Benedict would be able to “connect” with people as his predecessor John Paul II had done. After all, Benedict arrived in America at age 80 while John Paul II was a mere 59 when he visited for the first time in 1979. 
Benedict did more than connect. He bonded. He moved multitudes. He showed remarkable courage, wisdom and compassion.
Until last week many people both within and outside the church in North America simply didn’t know Joseph Ratzinger, and some didn’t want to know him. They knew only half truths about a man who was called “the Vatican doctrinal watchdog” and who was often portrayed as a strict, distant, scholarly bookworm who lacked the charisma and flair of his predecessor on the throne of Peter.
The papal visit included a royal White House welcome on the pontiff’s 81st birthday, an address to Catholic educators, a major and a minor address to the General Assembly of the United Nations and the staff (not many political leaders acknowledge the little people who make the big organizations work). 
Jews in a Manhattan synagogue were blessed by a visit from the German Pope on the eve of Passover. And clergy and religious were strengthened and moved to tears in Manhattan during a magnificent liturgy on Fifth Avenue.
The media did not miss the deep significance of the Holy Father’s private and moving meeting with victims of clergy sex abuse at the Vatican embassy in Washington. The Pope was unafraid to enter into the pain, confusion, sadness and evil of the sex abuse crisis. He let people know that he listened and understood and the Pope will continue to act so that such a disaster would never repeat itself.
Benedict reached out as a gentle, grandfatherly shepherd and blessed disabled and suffering young people while their parents and caregivers stood nearby and wept. It was a very rare occasion to hear Benedict speak about his youth in Nazi Germany when he addressed tens of thousands of young people at the outdoor rally: “My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew — infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion — before it was fully recognized for the monster it was,” said the Pope, who deserted the German army near the end of the Second World War.