Michael Swan

Development and Peace has new marching orders — new orders that are older than the Church.

A papal apology on Indigenous land in Canada is not irrelevant south of the border.

The  Basilian Fathers are praying for the Pope’s knee — not just because Pope Francis’ trip to Canada next month hangs in the balance and not merely because they are papists, loyal to His Holiness and the magisterium. The Pope personally asked the Basilians to pray for his knee.

If Pope Francis is going to broaden or deepen the apology he offered April 1 in Rome, then it’s going to happen at Maskwacis, 70 kilometres south of Edmonton, site of one of the largest Indian residential schools in Canada.

A First Nations group of residential school survivors has publicly put forward specific wording for a papal apology widely expected in Canada in July.  

Honouring Toronto’s Cardinal Thomas Collins for the thousands of refugees he has brought to Canada came quite naturally to the community at the Chaldean Catholic Cathedral of the Good Shepherd.

Pope Francis’ commitment to Indigenous people to visit Canada “where I will be able better to express to you my closeness” now has the concrete form of an official itinerary.

Reading the lives of the saints to learn about the saints is short changing yourself. Whatever glimpse of a saint may peek through the frequently dull, awkward and even inscrutable prose of a typical hagiography is mostly valuable for what it teaches us about ourselves.

The first ever dean of a combined Regis College-University of St. Michael’s graduate faculty of theology is the first Eastern-rite Catholic in charge of theology at either school and the first lay person who does not belong to a religious order to hold the top academic job at the Jesuits’ Regis College.

After 14 deaths at one mine with Canadian connections and a pattern of corruption and abuses across the country, Peru’s bishops are asking Canada’s government and its vast mining industry to do something to protect Indigenous people and poor farmers who often suffer when mines move into their neighbourhood.