Women’s Rights

"Motherly love," painting/drawing by Dee-Jay Monika Rumbolt. MMIWG Gallery of Artistic Expressions https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/artists/motherly-love/

The Role of Indigenous Women

July 24, 2019 at 12:21 pm

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of articles about the conclusions of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry. You can read the first one here, the second here and the third here.)   To show how Canada—and we in it—perpetrate genocide against Indigenous womenRead More

"In My Heart," a tribute to all those who participated in the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Hermina Joldersma (Source: MMIWG https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/artists/in-my-heart/)

Relationships Are Sacred

July 10, 2019 at 11:19 am

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of articles about the conclusions of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry. You can read the first one here and the second here.)   Cassidy Bernard, a young mother died last fall in We’koqma’q (Whycocomagh). Last week,Read More

photo: National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

A Game-Changing Inquiry

June 26, 2019 at 12:19 pm

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles about the conclusions of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry. You can read the first one here.)   Why does the MMIWG inquiry declare a “Canadian genocide”? Why raise such a storm of controversy overRead More

Red dress, Potlotek First Nation, 9 June 2019

The Meaning of Genocide

June 12, 2019 at 11:21 am

“We recognized the need for a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and we have commissioners who came back with findings of fact and with calls to action. “We thank them for their work, we applaud their work and we accept their findings, including thatRead More

Pope Benedict XVI

No Act of Contrition: Benedict XVI on Sexual Abuse

April 17, 2019 at 12:19 pm

I wonder how Pope Francis feels about having a 92-year-old armchair quarterback living in a neat little cottage somewhere behind the Vatican who suddenly decides to “unpack” the sexual abuse crisis, its causes and solutions? Retired Pope Benedict XVI has decided to share his enlightened version of the worst scandalRead More

Women pallbearers in Flint, Michigan. Source: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RkYn5M14gY

Reinventing Rites of Passage

March 27, 2019 at 12:24 pm

The late Father Gerry Curry (1934-2019) was ordained in 1960 as a member of the Scarboro Foreign Mission Society and served 15 years in Japan, returning home to Canada in 1975 to become editor of Scarboro Missions Magazine, which he did from 1975-79 and again from 1989-2003. As his obituaryRead More

Fast & Curious: International Women’s Day Edition

Fast & Curious: International Women’s Day Edition

March 8, 2019 at 11:12 am

Note: In honor of International Women’s Day, I set out to profile Women Unlimited, a women’s group founded in Sydney in the early ’80s. I discovered the group had been formed from the steering committee of a conference held in Sydney around that time and the conference itself was soRead More

XV Ordinary Synod of Bishops on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment (Vatican Media)

Synod Response to Sex Abuse Scandal Falls Short

November 14, 2018 at 11:19 am

More than 250 bishops from around the world came together at the Vatican from October 3-28 for the XV Ordinary Synod of Bishops on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment. Also invited to participate were 30 young people, chosen (one assumes) for their engagement with the faith, representatives of bothRead More

By Milliped [CC BY 3.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Confronting a Culture of Secrecy — and Worse

September 12, 2018 at 1:17 pm

Nobody denies anymore the culture of secrecy and cover-up in the Catholic Church, but what if it is simply part and parcel of an even worse culture, one of pedophilia? How else to explain what has been revealed again and again as common practice among clergy? Especially as, hard onRead More

For Catholics, Truth Often Stranger than Fiction

For Catholics, Truth Often Stranger than Fiction

August 8, 2018 at 11:38 am

Summer is considered the best time for light reading, not for serious books that could actually destroy a beautiful sunny day on the beach or the deck, but I recently dove into Crimes of the Father, the 2015 novel by the prolific Irish-Australian author Thomas Keneally. Right off the bat,Read More