Catholic Register Editorial

Two mercifully flown decades ago, Mr. Dan Brown foisted on the world from some printing presses the Luddites sadly missed smashing, a purported novel called The Da Vinci Code.

Neither truth nor reconciliation is served by claims that cannot be reconciled with what is known to be true.

As this issue of The Catholic Register reaches readers, our colleague Michael Swan will be packing his bags for Rome to cover Pope Francis’ meeting with Indigenous delegates from Canada. Given Swan’s reportorial industry, our upcoming issues will no doubt be heavily weighted with stories on who said what to whom and, most crucially, what it all meant. Against two years of pandemic, and now the horrors in Ukraine, the sessions that begin in Rome March 28 mark a historic moment for speeding up the snail’s pace process of reconciliation between Canada’s First Nations and its, shall we say, later arrivals.

In his homily drawing from the Gospel narrative of the Transfiguration of Jesus, on the Second Sunday of Lent, Pope Francis issued a call to communion, and a reminder of the meaning of the communion of the saints.

Fifty-two years ago this June, Mr. Edwin Starr immortally caught millions of ears around the world with a song that asked a short, sharp rhetorical question.

Last Friday morning, in the leadup to Lent, with Vladimir Putin’s invading troops on the doorstep of Ukraine, Pope Francis paid a surprise call on his neighbours at the Russian embassy on Rome’s Via della Conciliazione. 

Seven years ago this spring a high-profile and very public Catholic commentator noisily left the Church after having already abandoned and returned to it previously.

More than 130 years ago, in a foundational encyclical of Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIII warned against “crafty agitators” within the political class bent on dividing society for pernicious ends.

Premier François Legault vowed in advance of a truckers’ convoy arriving in Quebec City there would be zero tolerance for antics that interfered with residents enjoying “normal” life.

Critics across the Church spectrum habitually accuse Canada’s Catholic leadership of ducking what “must” be done — must inevitably being defined by what a given critic wants.