Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
Inspired by Truth, Enlightening Minds for the Church in Canada and Throughout the World
We celebrate a veritable panoply of saints today: In Canada, we have the memorial of Saint Marguerite D’Youville (+1771), a lovely French Canadian mademoiselle, who married young to a dissolute man, Francois D’Youville, a dissipated bootlegger who sold liquor to the easily-addicted Natives, and would disappear for long periods. He did not live long, but[…]
Concerning the other night’s ‘debate’, allow me to offer the following enthymeme, a sort of summarized syllogism described by Aristotle: When a society loses faith, it loses reason. When we lose reason, we lose manners. When we lose manners, we lost courtesy, And when we lose courtesy, we become a herd of braying asses. Evidence[…]
In a surprise move, Pope Francis has appointed a Canadian Jesuit priest, Father Michael Czerny, as one of the newest members of the august body of Cardinals in the Church. There have been ‘cardinals’ – literally, those men upon whom the Church ‘hinged’ – since the seventh century or so, but it was in 1059[…]
What is one to say of our Prime Minister – or Prime Minstrel, as he has been dubbed – prancing around in blackface, curiously downplayed by the CBC and other Liberal-friendly media to perhaps the ontologically more accurate, yet morally slightly less damning, ‘brownface’ in media reports? Yet there really is no real way to[…]
In the rest of the world, the Canadian, or if you will, North American, Martyrs, six priests and two laymen put to death for the faith between 1642 and 1649 – are celebrated on October 19th, when the layman Jean de la Lalande was put to death in 1646, one day after the priest whom[…]
An apparently disgruntled reader took some umbrage at my take on Grumblin’ Greta, describing, au contraire, yours truly as the ‘humourless’ one, and ‘knowing nothing about large families’. Hmm. If readers do find me lacking in a certain joie de vivre and jocularity, please do sound off, whether in a humorous and humourless way. Then[…]
Catholicism was brought to Korea by scholars in the 18th century, via books written in Chinese. When missionaries arrived in the early 19th century, they were surprised to find the Faith had already taken hold amongst a small, but dedicated, group, holding out against a sea of paganism; sounds a lot like Canada, with the[…]
Saint Cornelius was Pope for a scant two years in the third century, elected in 251, fighting against his fellow bishop Novatian, who declared himself the true Pope, thus also unwittingly making himself history’s first anti-Pope. Novatian was an early ‘hard-liner’, teaching that certain sins were so evil, to beyond the pale -especially apostasy, failing[…]
The Exaltation of the Cross – so it has been termed in the liturgical revisions after Vatican II – dates back to the time of Constantine, when his mother, Helena, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 326, by apparently miraculous means discovered the wood upon which Christ had been crucified three centuries before. This was[…]
In honour of the Blessed Virgin, we might peruse Pope Saint John Paul II’s encyclical on the Rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, which he promulgated on the 25th anniversary of the beginning of his pontificate, October 16th, 2002, about the same time as he re-instituted this memorial of the Holy Name of Mary. Our society needs[…]
