Fr. Damien MacPherson is monitoring the Synod on Synodality in Rome for The Catholic Register. This is his Week Three synopsis.

The presence of confidentiality was briefly interrupted when, quite by accident, information from table discussions became accessible to the public. The event was caused when information was posted to a cloud serve accessible to the public. The incident was quickly corrected without revealing enough pertinent information to make a serious difference. In response, Pope Francis again called for prudence and confidentiality.

Some years ago Brad Wilcox, the University of Virginia sociologist, gave a conference presentation  about how mothers differ from fathers. The feedback forms revealed a portion of the audience thought the presentation was so self-evident as to be unnecessary. On the other side, a significant number were offended by the concept of sex differences in parenting. 

May there be no breach in the walls, no exile,

and no cry of distress in the streets

Psalms144: 14

On a recent trip to Toronto I inadvertently miscued my GPS and found myself wandering around a part of the city that I hadn’t yet explored. What struck me first was the extraordinary level of homeless people, encampments and other struggling individuals that I encountered — in some cases, block after block of people in need. The next thing that caught my attention, however, was that, like Vancouver where I live now, there was also an extraordinary number of faith-based community agencies set up in the most devastated areas of need, from churches to refuges.

Gratitude is our invitation at Thanksgiving, a feast to celebrate the work and gifts of harvest. In my corner of the world, it was the second consecutive year of drought for many farming families. My garden was well watered by the sprinklers, but I crowded the space. The pumpkins and tomatoes took over so the potatoes, carrots and beets were pretty sparse. Season to season, the abundance of harvest is not always the same. Thanksgiving comes anyway.

“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.  If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord������Ƶapp.”

(Romans 14:7-9).

When we hear of death, there is sadness and there is grief. We are often confused when we see death. We really don’t understand death. However, when death occurs, the Church has spiritual practices in place that may help the faithful to reflect on their understanding of death and to help offer a dignified farewell to the deceased. The words of St. Paul  give us an insight: the Church������Ƶapp teachings of death and the funeral practices are based on one of the tenets of our faith — the Death and the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Some weeks, violence raises its ugly head to remind us that it is always lurking, shrouded by the darkness of the night.

Canada������Ƶapp dioceses should adopt new measures to recruit more young men to choose a priestly vocation, says a new study of Canadian seminarians and recently ordained priests.

On an ordinary weekday, Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023, tens of thousands of ordinary Canadians took to the streets of our major cities and sleepy towns to protest the extraordinary promotion of gender ideology to children and youth in our schools. They called it “The 1 Million March 4 Children.” Seemingly out of nowhere, passionate parents, concerned citizens and fed-up youth took to the streets to peacefully protest the deluge, the unrelenting onslaught of often explicit and graphic LGBTQ+ issues being highlighted in cross-curricular fashion from pre-K through to high school graduation.

The Synod on Synodality is the most important moment in our Church since Vatican II. And yet, a surprising number of lay Catholics still know nothing about this momentous process currently taking place in our Church.

“Ban it, or use it?” ponders the headline of an article marking the six-month anniversary of an innovation rocking the education and academic world. Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has turned the practice of conventional teaching and learning on its head forever.