European Politics

Michael Drul has been making  and selling pysanky — the decorative Easter eggs in the Ukrainian tradition believed to ward off evil — to raise funs for those affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There is a pivotal scene in the middle of the new biographical drama Fr. Stu where the eventual boxer-turned-priest, portrayed by Mark Wahlberg, tries to convince the rector of Mount Angel Seminary he is worthy of admittance.

On March 20, 2022, Archbishop Christian Lépine celebrated a Thanksgiving Mass to mark the 10th anniversary of his appointment as Archbishop of Montreal.

The bodies in the street, the abandoned tanks, the blackened and collapsed buildings, the bewildered and exhausted survivors who speak and weep before television cameras do not merely tell us the news. This Holy Week the bulletins from Ukraine are teaching us about God.

More than 70 aboriginal languages are spoken in Canada, according to the 2016 census. But you can’t fully celebrate the Eucharist in any of them. Anointing the sick, baptisms, funerals, weddings and other important sacramental markers of Catholic life are also delivered on Indigenous land in English or French.

Susan Martinuk wonders when Canadians are finally going to wake up to the fact that this country’s ballyhooed universal-access, single-payer health-care system is a failure whose rationing of service and interminable wait times lead directly to pain, suffering and medically-preventable deaths.

It was as if the Earth stood still on its axis for a moment. That was when a family friend broke the news to me. On April 5, the Hon. David Kilgour, the distinguished Canadian politician and ambassadeur extraordinaire of global human rights, had boarded his last flight, and gone home to his father in Heaven.

People following the Stations of the Cross at Rome’s Colosseum this year will find along the Via Dolorosa a message of hope, including with a Russian and Ukrainian family both carrying a cross together at the nighttime ceremony.

Since the legalization of euthanasia in Canada in 2016, I’ve had two people tell me of their parent who would be dying in this way. These were acquaintances who did not know me well, not even my last name, and yet they shared this deeply personal information. Yet in my entire life, I’ve never had even one woman mention in passing that she had an abortion. I’ve never had anyone casually tell me they accompanied someone to an abortion.

The road to Golgotha is long and arduous. Bewilderment and tension perfuse through the masses, crowding together, eager to catch a glimpse of the blood-soaked figure crouched under the crippling weight of a wooden cross. A Roman centurion, donned in red, kicking up clouds of dust with his sandals, orders brusquely in churlish Latin, “festina, Nazarene.”