Twenty years of youth ministry is a big deal, which is why NET Ministries of Canada decided to celebrate the milestone with a year-long celebration.

I once found myself in a room full of photographers forced to make a passionate defence of the Pope. It was an odd sort of defence. I was defending the Pope’s right to look frail, weak, lost and vulnerable in public.

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis will spend two days in Turin to venerate the Shroud of Turin; meet young people, workers, juvenile detainees, immigrants and the sick; and visit with his Italian relatives from northern Italy.

VATICAN CITY - A religious procession, a brainstorm session and a few glasses of wine led a group of residents gathered in a shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to come up with a plan to interview Pope Francis.

LONDON, Ont. - Despite the winter winds howling outside, youth ministry specialist Dan Moynihan and his team are busy preparing to welcome hundreds of high school students to camp this summer.

BRAMPTON, ONT. - Students who have an interest in a higher calling came together March 3 to explore their religious and priestly vocation curiosity. 

Fossil Free Faith has launched a new program recruiting youth to lead the conversation in their faith communities about divesting in fossil fuel companies.

TORONTO - Everyone needs spiritual direction at some point in their life, said Sr. Mechtilde O’Mara.

TORONTO - Covenant House is stepping up to give young women and girls caught in the grip of the sex trade a way out.

MANILA, Philippines - Young people drew inspiration from an encounter with Pope Francis at the University of Santo Tomas.

MANILA, Philippines - Father Matthieu Dauchez knows the children he works with are not the only poor people in the Philippines, but that has not stopped him from lobbying loudly and praying constantly that Pope Francis will stop by.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - Eleven-year-old Jamin Diaz is finding that music and his participation in a symphony orchestra are giving him the chance to steer clear of violence that plagues his country.

TORONTO - Hundreds of students lining up for reconciliation, kids playing Frisbee with the Sisters of Life, bishops sitting with teens rocking out to worship-and-praise music and thousands of young people on their knees adoring the Eucharist — scenes from Toronto’s first Steubenville youth conference. 

While Pope Francis says Mass in Manger Square, Bethlehem there will be peace talks in the Middle East.

TORONTO - Salesian Father Michael Pace need not look far to see vocations in many forms. One of his younger sisters is a consecrated Missionary of Charity in San Francisco, his brother and two older sisters are each married with 20 children between them, and his other younger sister, Antoinette, has discerned a call to the single life and works as her parish’s lay pastoral associate.