Michael Swan

Mere memory is not enough for the year we have just lived. Misty-eyed nostalgia would be a sin. It would fall far short of the mark.

When Michael Fullan was hired to run Catholic Charities in 1993, the NDP government at Queen’s Park was trying to get religion out of the social safety net — looking for an excuse to defund the Catholic, Jewish and other religiously based social services.

Twenty religious congregations have joined together to lobby Ottawa politicians on climate change and social justice. 

With so much of the mineral wealth needed for the world’s green transition, the future is in Congo’s hands. 

A dramatic shutdown of the Caritas Internationalis offices in Rome by papal decree was a surprise, and not a surprise, to the leaders of the 162 Catholic agencies that belong to the world’s second largest humanitarian network after the Red Cross.

As Canada prepares to take the lead among the Core Group trying to solve Haiti’s anarchic and violent crisis, Canada’s top Jesuit is offering Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a precious resource — 55 Haitian Jesuits, including 35 currently in the troubled Caribbean nation. 

Like a healthcare jazz band, the Saint Elizabeth Foundation, the charitable arm of SE Health Care, has improvised its way around provincial funding priorities to launch a new hospice for the homeless in Windsor, Ont.

The people who work at Catholic Family Services of Toronto aren’t the sort who celebrate themselves. So when the social workers, counsellors and their support staff came together Nov. 17 to celebrate a century of work with the poor and the distressed of Toronto, they were there “because of the people we serve,” Catholic Family Services counsellor Dominique Lemelin told The Catholic Register.

In far off places, I’ve seen children under armed guard, fenced in, sitting in the dust, holding themselves up on the edges of human existence — exiled to places where any notion of the rights of children seems fanciful, even sadly comical.

Money for the damage done isn’t the same thing as preventing even more damage. That simple distinction left Yusra Shafi, Development and Peace-Caritas Canada delegate to the COP27 climate change conference, disappointed as she flew home from Egypt.