On September 23, the town of Windsor in Nova Scotia commemorated the 100th anniversary of the training of the Jewish Legion, a battalion of the British army that fought to liberate Palestine from the Ottoman Empire during World War I. In 1918, a young Jewish man named David Ben-Gurion wasRead More

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

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

What do the Crusades, Slavery, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the Sins of the Church have in common? All have been the subjects of apologies from popes on behalf of the Catholic Church. In Bolivia in July 2015, the current pope, Francis, apologized for “the grave sins committed against the nativeRead...

Sunday will mark the feast of Easter which, as we who call ourselves Catholic have always been taught, is the most important feast in the church calendar. Yes, more important than Christmas, since the cornerstone of the Catholic faith is the belief that Christ rose from the dead. Easter hasRead More

The Rohingya, whom most of us had probably never heard of before their plight began to be shared via TV and newspapers around the world, are “the world’s most persecuted minority,” according to  Al Jazeera. They are an ethnic group, largely Muslim, that has lived for centuries in the majorityRead More

Perhaps one of Charles Dickens’ most famous lines was Oliver Twist’s “Please sir, I want some more.” First published in monthly installments from February 1837 to April 1839, Oliver Twist was pretty much an attack on Britain’s Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in an introductionRead More

Pope Francis came to the papacy as an outsider, a non-European and the first Jesuit elected leader of the world’s Catholics. He very quickly gave up many of the traditional trappings of the papacy and encouraged — even required — those of us who have more to share with theRead More

The Catholic Church divides the liturgical year into six seasons, the first of which, Advent, lasts four weeks (this year only three full weeks) and has what the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops describes as a “twofold character”: a season during which Catholics prepare to celebrate the birth ofRead More

Fr. Lloyd Dwyer, who passed away two weeks ago, was a man who made an impression on the many people whose paths he crossed during an interesting and meaningful life. Born in New Glasgow in 1931, one of seven children of John and Catherine Murphy, he graduated from Normal CollegeRead More