Today is the commemoration of Our Lady of Fatima, a title given to the Virgin Mary after she appeared ‘brighter than the sun, shedding rays of light’ to three shepherd children in the summer of 1917 (no painting ever did Our Lady justice) just outside the village of Fatima, in central Portugal, about 76 miles […]
By the time you read this, London (the one in England) will have elected a new mayor. The residents did not have much of a choice: A Muslim, raised in Britain, of Pakistani lineage, or a multi-millionaire playboy kicked out of Eton for smoking pot. Not a surprise, that London would eventually end up with […]
Today is the memorial of one of the most heroic bishops in the history of the Church, the late, great Saint Athanasius (+373), a foundational Eastern Doctor, along with Basil, Gregory Nazianzen and Ambrose. He was the hero of Bd. John Henry Cardinal Newman, who wrote erudite and engaging essays on Athanasius and his battle […]
Saint Catherine of Siena (1334-1380) was a feisty, indomitable woman. One might, in a Catholic way, claim her as an early ‘feminist’, in the true JP II sense of that term, recognizing the genius, and the power, of woman, and her role in the Church. Catherine was born the 23rd child of an Italian […]
(The following is an address I offered yesterday at Saint Hedwig’s Church for the Divine Mercy celebration. jpm) This being the Year of Mercy, decreed by Pope Francis, as well as Divine Mercy Sunday, as decreed by Pope Saint John Paul II, back in 2000, I thought that I had better not stray too far […]
In, 1984, Pope Saint John Paul II penned an Apostolic Letter on the mystery of human suffering, Salvifici Doloris (curiously, now looking back, the same year he made his first apostolic journey to Canada). One priest in a talk I heard recently mentioned that it may be remembered as one of his most prophetic works, […]
With the permission of a Superior Court Justice, Ontario had its first euthanasia case this morning, when an 81 year old man suffering from end-stage lymphoma was murdered quietly by his physician, with the ‘patient’s’ family surrounding his entrance into a dubious eternity (the patient’s lawyers name, ironically enough, was Andrew Faith). There will be […]
As promised, I have attached below the novena prayer to Saint Joseph, which the Archbishop of Ottawa, Terence Prendergast, has asked all Catholics in Canada to pray , along with some sacrifice and fasting (a propos already in this latter time of Lent), particularly against the great evil of medically-assisted murder-suicide. The novena begins today, […]
*I have an article just published this morning in Crisis magazine (crisismagazine.com), which you can find here. I will post it here after a few days, for your perusal. We are indeed entering dark days in this Dominion of Canada, and I am glad to see the Archbishop of Ottawa, Canada’s primatial See, has asked […]
On a news report the other evening, it was mentioned that enrolment in the humanities (philosophy, literature, history, to say nothing of theology) has dropped by 50% over the past ten years in our universities. Burgeoning onwards with full enrolments, on the other hand, are the S.T.E.M. studies, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, with which […]