In the classic movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles, John Candy is driving late at night when a car comes alongside with the person at the wheel shouting with increasing urgency: “You’re going the wrong way.” Candy shrugs and rolls his eyes: “How would he know where we are going?” After careering through two oncoming semi-trucks — a near-death experience — Candy������Ƶapp character comes to realize he was indeed going the wrong way. 

Historic wash out

I am having a hard time justifying renewing my subscription when The Catholic Register completely misrepresents the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops got a hot scolding last week from the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec for what the FPJQ called a “deplorable” decision to bar journalists from this week������Ƶapp plenary meetings.

Once in a blue moon someone asks me what we can do to shake our fellow citizens, including fellow Catholics, out of their apathy.

Distinctly Indigenous

Beyond apologies and reparations, the Canadian Catholic Church needs to make fundamental changes to its relations with Indigenous peoples. After almost 400 years, the Church has produced only a tiny number of Indigenous clergy. The main reason is the requirement of clerical celibacy that goes against the fundamental Indigenous values of family and kin relationships.

The commonplace complaint that the Church exists in a post-Christian society tends to misplace the common sense fact that the Church emerged from, and transformed, pre-Christian society.

Perhaps you’ve heard some recent rumours and rumblings from Rome about the possibility of the Catholic Church reconsidering, re-looking at, revamping, re-working or redacting Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), the 1968 encyclical by Pope Paul VI on contraception (synopsis: the document says “no” to contraception).

Owning less has been a necessity and a goal as we downsized our home with our last move. And last fall, I took up the wooland.com challenge to wear the same dress for 100 days in a row. I was intrigued (as a knitter) by the prospect of wearing wool, exhausted by the choices in my closet every morning, and challenged by the impact fashion has on the environment.

There is a wonderful cartoon that shows a driving instructor testing his young charge.

The aspect of the proposed Alberta sovereignty act which most gives me pause is not the legal chaos into which it will throw this province if enacted — although that is worrisome enough — but the spirit of division which it seeks to codify in law.