“If you deny me before the world, I will deny you before my Father, which art is Heaven.” 

(Matt 10:33)

With the recent salvo across the bow of religious rights and freedoms, the very person of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), the Chaplain General, Brigadier General J. L. Guy Bélisle, a Roman Catholic Pastoral Associate, has turned inclusion into exclusion. It is shocking to think that the very department of the CAF intended Charter guarantees of freedom of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion and expression would so readily enforce denial of those same rights.

Have you been hearing news from the ongoing Synod on Synodality in Rome about proposals such as women deacons and ordaining women to the priesthood? As a former radical feminist who believed that women could and should be ordained to the priesthood, allow me to respond.

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.

I detest The Catholic Register. The paper is largely a fraud. A name change to The Register or, even more appropriately, The Anti-Catholic Register could occur without argument. The staff writers laud a pope who borders on the heretical with the current synod, is restructuring the Church in ways that are aligned with the world and against the faith, will ensure its demise, and whose very legitimacy as pope is being questioned.   

Not even the horrifying violence spiralling beyond imagining in the Holy Land should blind us to Hamas’ ultimate responsibility for the carnage resulting for its Oct. 7 slaughter of Israeli innocents.

Excerpts from various sources commenting on the terror attack on Israel