Luke Stocking

I had just arrived back in Toronto from a week-long team meeting in Montreal with all our staff from across Canada. Just before we gathered for the meeting, our executive director, Carl Hétu, passed away after a long battle with cancer.

We have launched an emergency appeal at Development & Peace – Caritas Canada to support the Peacemakers in the Middle East who we are honoured to call our partners. Well over 200 people recently joined a webinar we hosted to hear from three of these Peacemakers: Karam Abi Yazbeck, Nayla Tabbara, and Raffoul Raffa.

“Why should we take care of people in other countries when our own people in Canada need help?”

Have the courage to be challenging as Jesus was. And think about the ways you can share the beauty of things like the rosary, adoration, and above all the Eucharist, so that they point to the powerful ideas in Catholic Social Teaching that guide us in how to live with one another and all creation. How pleasing to God that would be.

“Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women. Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”

Ten years after the Paris Agreement and Pope Francis’s call to protect our common home, the world faces more extreme weather and environmental degradation. Hosting COP30 in Brazil, a country where the Church, Indigenous peoples, and social movements have long walked together in defense of life, further strengthened the hope felt throughout the Catholic community.

The Notre Dame Pilgrimage was begun by Rev. Jim Mulligan, a Holy Cross father and Notre Dame teacher who started the tradition in 1975 after a pilgrimage he experienced in France. It quickly grew beyond Notre Dame to include other high schools in the Niagara Catholic District School Board. They now organize their own pilgrimages after the original became too large for them all.

Our mission at Development & Peace - Caritas Canada is to address the root causes of poverty, oppression and inequality by working with partners in the global south and mobilizing Canadians in the common struggle for justice & dignity.

“We are in the Lord’s hands, and we trust that, with the help of many good people around the world, this will stop.”

Essentially the churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean have raised their voice ahead of COP30, the UN Climate Conference to take place in Belem, Brazil this November. We should listen.