Youth Speak News

I can’t express the sadness my heart feels at the rising rate of suicide among young people today. The numbers are staggering and I feel helpless thinking of so many who have lost hope.

Echoes of Mother Teresa’s charity are reverberating in the Greater Toronto Area.

I see the world enduring endless strife and conflict. But beyond this chaos, I see people standing to fight for humanity.

A pro-life student group at Brandon University has won the right to operate on campus after a lawsuit against the school’s student union was settled out of court.

Maybe I should get a phone. Almost everyone I know has a phone, but at the age of 17, I’ve never had one. At first it was because of my parents. Now that they have given me the opportunity to have a phone, I’ve been weighing the possibility.

Cardinal Oswald Gracias is encouraging his clergy in the Archdiocese of Mumbai to imitate the recently slain priest, Fr. Jacques Hamel. The French priest was brutally killed by two men proclaiming loyalty to the Islamic State on July 26.

In the short two weeks I spent in Poland for WYD, I underwent a profound spiritual revival, one which I had been searching for over the last few years.

TORONTO – In a way, it’s like Fr. Peter Turrone is coming home. As a student at the University of Toronto, Turrone saw the Newman Centre Catholic Chaplaincy as a second home, a spiritual oasis. Now, as he takes up his new position as Newman’s executive director and pastor, he is excited for the opportunity to serve the community that gave him so much.

I have begun my very first major pilgrimage. On July 20, I’ll board a flight to Warsaw, Poland, where for the following 12 days I’ll join thousands of others partaking in cultural and religious events at World Youth Day, created more than 30 years ago by St. John Paul II. This year’s event is being held in his homeland, Krakow, where he was archbishop.

In the UK, a Catholic teenager is suing his former employer and co-workers for religious aggravated assault. The teenager claims he was subjected to a “mock crucifixion,” tying him from a makeshift wooden cross. The court case addresses other indidents in which his co-workers drew crosses and phallic symbols all over the teenager’s body with permanent marker, setting spray deodorant aflame near his head and giving him a forcible wedgie that caused cuts and bruises.