Sacramental solution

Sr. Helena Burns concludes her Jan. 30 column about media literacy with St. Paul’s description of the end times when humankind will be subject to a “powerful delusion” (2 Thessalonians 2:11). She believes our vulnerability to delusion stems from a failure to love the truth.

Critics across the Church spectrum habitually accuse Canada’s Catholic leadership of ducking what “must” be done — must inevitably being defined by what a given critic wants.

It was a celebration of a woman many hope will one day be declared a saint. It was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and the man who gave the homily was New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

A true mob is terrible to witness, much less get stuck in. Something happens when humans are pressed together in fear and anger: a feral scent is emitted, an emboldening and anxious spirit. Once unleashed, it crashes over and draws down all in its wake.

We arrived in the Eternal City with the dawn. On the in-flight screen, as we flew through the darkness, I could see the sun racing towards us. It reached Rome the same time as we did.

Add one more item to the list of COVID-19’s destructive impacts: the concept of private health care may be becoming more palatable to a majority of Canadians, a claim that a national survey made early last month.

In last week’s column I recalled Pope John Paul II’s call for “a patient and fraternal dialogue” among Christian leaders and theologians on possible reform of papal primacy. The day after I sent that column to TheRegister for publication, I received my copy of the British Catholic magazine TheTablet in which Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, discussed the same topic.

Open the churches

Many thanks to Dr. Pascal Bastien and Dr. Lucas Vivas for expressing so beautifully my own thoughts, and I’m sure those of many others, on the closure of our churches. We can only hope our bishops and priests are listening.

American journalist Holman W. Jenkins Jr., who is typically brilliant, outdid even himself recently identifying the emerging metaverse as a potential end game for current woke identity politics.

Be careful with words spoken in a hyper-sensitive age