The adage holds that when supping with the Devil, it������Ƶapp best to use a long spoon. Current Vatican politics and diplomacy seems to have spun it into Oliver Twist������Ƶapp: “Please, sir, I want some more.”

B&E Theatre is presenting John Patrick Shanley������Ƶapp Doubt: A Parable, one of my favourite plays, at the Church of the Holy Trinity behind Toronto������Ƶapp Eaton Centre. A clever idea to immerse the play in a Church, but not a Catholic Church.

My inclination is to defend whoever is our pope. I say this for several reasons. For one a pope is Christ������Ƶapp shadow on Earth. I also believe popes are chosen by men influenced by the Holy Spirit. Lastly, I’m a convert. The idea of criticizing a pope seems presumptuous for someone relatively new to the faith.

Presence has been swirling around me, chasing me in the fall wind, working its way through my hair. I taste it in time with friends, in singing in a choir, and in the longing to run away from what is hard.

The world today has numerous crises — climate change, pandemic, growing discrepancies of power and wealth, the nuclear threat and war, not only in Ukraine but wars in places that go underreported. Perhaps the greatest crisis is the lack of leadership capable of dealing with these substantive crises.

Magazine huzzahs

I want to extend my congratulations to the staff of The Catholic Register for the excellent commemorative magazine Penance and Progress. The articles are thorough and thought-provoking. 

While creating the generation that came to life from 1946 to 1964, Canadians were in the midst of the Baby Boom.

I have often prayed for others to join the ministry of “The Church on the Street.” However, even though many have come to look and see, none has chosen to follow. My offer of “franchises available” has failed to convince. Unfortunately, the front-page news this week of two murders in the area dampened any enthusiasm there might have been.

The best sermon I ever heard was delivered by Fr. Philip Merdinger, the founder of the Brotherhood of Hope, a religious community dedicated to campus ministry. Father preached a retreat for us Daughters of St. Paul, and the gist of his sermon was: “You are not the most important thing in the world. God is.”

As a child, I was fishing off a wooden dock at the small lake near the town in B.C. where I grew up when a farmer from Saskatchewan and his son appeared  as if out of a dream I didn’t know I was having.