Feature

It may be 30 years since Cardinal Michael Czerny left the Jesuit-run Central American University in El Salvador, but it’s not a place that has forgotten him.

About 1.5 million Canadian stories begin at Pier 21 in Halifax. Cardinal Michael Czerny’s is one of them.

“It’s a daunting thing, but it’s a wonderful opportunity too,” Cardinal Michael Czerny told The Catholic Register as he prepared for a whirlwind Oct. 4-6 weekend: ordained a bishop on Friday, elevated to the College of Cardinals on Saturday and engaged as a special secretary to the Synod on the Amazon on Sunday.

At age 73, Graydon Nicholas has lived a life of firsts.

Thirty-five years ago this month, Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to visit Canada. The impact of those 12 days in September hasn’t been forgotten.

Canadians can’t extinguish the thousands of forest fires raging across the Amazon region but the devastation should become a call for Catholics to forge an alliance with the Indigenous people of the Amazon, says the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.

A familiar face that has greeted visitors entering St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica since the late-1980s is getting a facelift.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- It’s not Joshua’s fault. He was born into statelessness more than three years ago in Bangkok and immediately suffered a stroke that left him seriously brain damaged. But Joshua scares the rest of his family daily.

In June, for the first time ever, Canadians told pollsters their number one concern is the environment. This puts Canadians on the same page with Pope Francis, who has called on everybody — Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, even atheist — to face up to the reality of human-caused climate change in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’.

Jesuit Fr. Adam Hincks does not remember the excitement, the mind-expanding fascination or the must-watch-TV coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. He was born in 1982.