Catholic Register Editorial

The images are still so fresh in our memories, the feelings still so easily recalled, that it is incredible to realize that 20 years have passed since the events of a day that will always be known as 9/11.

It’s easy for Canada to be smug about its COVID-19 vaccination rate, but we can’t afford that luxury — not when so much of the world is still starving for vaccine relief.

First it was grief, then it was anger, then it was destruction.

To say this is a challenging summer for Catholics and their Church in Canada is putting it mildly. But where there is challenge, there is also opportunity and it’s vitally important that it is seized.

“As Minister of Health, I am proud to present Health Canada’s Second Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying (2020).”

There will be more … more unmarked graves, more grief, more anger, more shame.

A century ago this month, on June 1, 1921, about 400 women from across Canada gathered at Columbus Hall in Toronto for the first national convention of the Catholic Women’s League. The First World War had ended just two and a half years earlier. Arthur Meighen was prime minister, George V was still on the throne and Canada — 8.7-million strong — was a month away from its 54th birthday.

Racism, Pope Francis said, is “a virus that quickly mutates and, instead of disappearing, goes into hiding, and lurks in waiting.”

“Sorry” is a powerful word, but it is only a start to heal the deep wound inflicted by residential schools.

It came like a punch in the gut. The news of the discovery of the bodies of 215 children on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School have shaken us to the core. How could this happen in Canada? How could this happen under the roof of an institution run by Catholic religious orders? Despite all the stories of abuse at residential schools, despite the chronicling of horrors in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report of 2015, despite the history of systemic racism that has victimized Canada’s Indigenous people … this news rips opens wounds that have not even come close to healing.