The following is an excerpt of Saturday’s address by Cardinal William Joseph Levada in Kingston, Ontario, entitled, “Five Hundred Years After St. John Fisher: Benedict’s Ecumenical Initiatives to Anglicans”. Visible union with the Catholic Church does not mean absorption into a monolith, with the absorbed body being lost to the greater whole, the way a ...read more

The queue recedes quicker than you hoped for, but you’re ready. You clutch a folded list to ensure you don’t forget the painfully exhumed results of a thorough examination of conscience, not that you can very well read it in the dark of the confessional. When your turn comes, you pull back the heavy, velvet ...read more

My morning routine always begins by checking the Holy See Press Office’s Bollettino, or its English counterpart, the Vatican Information Service. While not all of the communiqués seem relevant to my work—bishop appointments to Switzerland, the creation of a new diocese in Malaysia—other announcements can be electrifying. Like today, the Vatican hinted at the imminent ...read more

Ottawa reader Fr. Jonathon Blake responded to my last post about the Holy Land, where I expressed how difficult it was to maintain a pilgrimage mindset amidst work responsibilities. He suggested that this challenge could be similar to a priest’s experience of Christmas, when accumulated graces might only reveal themselves once the “marathon” schedule has ...read more

If you watched S+L’s presentation of the General Audience earlier today, you know already that this week’s papal event was a little peculiar. The location was typical–the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall–as was Pope Benedict’s catechesis on St. Dominic, which was in keeping with his running series on medieval theologians. The usual script was interrupted, however, ...read more

Pope Benedict is encouraging priests to embrace new media and thus “give a soul” to the internet. The priest’s place in the digital world was the focus of his message for the 44th World Day of Communications, which was released this morning on the eve of the feast of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint ...read more

One thing is for sure: Mary saw the predicament the wedding party was in. She went to Jesus. “They have no wine”, she said. She is going around today saying to all of us, ‘They don’t have water to drink and food to eat in Port-au-Prince. They don’t have shelter, their houses have been flattened, ...read more

The following article was published in the YSN newsletter, which is sent to the student journalists writing for The Catholic Register’s Youth Speak News section. The article is a response to the question, “How can you cover a religious story as a journalist, while still having a personal spiritual experience?” Though it’s been over a ...read more

“Once in a while, the Lord takes delight in throwing a curve ball at us.” This is how newly-consecrated Bishop Vincent Nguyen began his final remarks in Toronto’s St. Michael’s Cathedral. It was an apt description of the 43-year-old’s rapid rise as Canada’s youngest bishop, but it also characterizes his family’s dramatic upheaval in Communist ...read more

Obtenir le lecteur Flash pour voir cette vidéo. Twenty-six years ago, Vincent Nguyen was a boy dreaming of freedom and a chance to become a priest when he and 19 relatives piled into a wooden fishing boat and prayed they would evade Vietnam’s coastal patrol and slip out to sea. So began The Globe and ...read more