Category: Highlight

Highlight

Illness forces cancellation of Autumn Edition

I am sorry to report that due to the ill health of managing editor Patrick Jamieson and emeritus editor Marnie Butler, there will not be an Autumn edition of Island Catholic News. Patrick is on the mend and hinted at a double issue at Christmas.

Frank Salmon, OMI, A Model of the Francis Way, Marks 50 Years

St. Anne’s Catholic Indian Church on Tzouhalem Road near Duncan, B.C., is one of the most historic churches on Vancouver Island. Since the mid-19th Century it has been served by a long list of missionaries, priests and bishops, many of whom were Oblates (OMI). In 1973 after his ordination Frank Salmon OMI was assigned to...

Vatican Formally Repudiates ‘Doctrine of Discovery’

The Vatican on March 30 formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” officially declaring that an historic policy used to justify colonial exploitation is “not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church.” The rejection of the concept, which has been used to describe a collection of papal teachings dating back to the 15th century, comes...

Pope Francis Has Named Two-Thirds of Cardinals Eligible to Elect His Successor

VATICAN CITY – Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the retired archbishop of Naples, celebrated his 80th birthday June 2 and, consequently, became ineligible to enter a conclave to elect a new pope. The cardinal’s aging out left the College of Cardinals with 121 clerics under the age of 80 and eligible to vote. Of those 121 cardinals,...

Catholic Paradigm Shift: 10 Years of Pope Francis Dismantling the Papal Court

Just months after his election in 2013, Pope Francis announced he would break with 400 years of tradition and would no longer spend summer holidays at Castel Gandolfo, a papal villa outside of Rome, instead preferring to remain at the Vatican and work through the summer months. In a January 2023 interview with the Associated...

L’Arche Worries After Vanier Revelations

INTRODUCTION By Patrick Jamieson One of our board members at ICN is from Ottawa where I have lived for a number of distinct periods: first as a child in the 1950s, then as a young parent in the late ‘70s; later when on leave from the paper to write longer works in the 1990s. During...

Pope Francis Doesn’t Hold Back in Condemning Exploitation in Congo

Pope Francis did not waste any time in naming the principal socio-political reality that threatens Africa. In his first address upon arriving in Congo on Jan. 31, he denounced the exploitation of the continent’s vast resources: “Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Hands off Africa! Stop choking Africa: It is not a mine...

The Year of the Graves: Why and How the World’s Media Got it so Wrong on Residential School Graves

INTRODUCTION Last edition of ICN we presented a one page article pointing out the misconceptions deliberately circulated by the mainstream media after the Kamloops Indian Residential revelations about unmarked graves of students, children of the First Nations population who endured the systemic attack on their culture and spirituality that the schools represented. Veteran journalist and...

Victoria Emulates Vancouver with Mega-Parish

INTRODUCTION This story needs certain background (and foreground) introduction. Historically, even during Bishop Remi De Roo’s progressive era, 1962-1999, Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Langford, a suburb of Victoria, was the most traditionalist of parishes, the slowest to follow Vatican II, and the bishop let it find its own pace. Victoria Diocese did...

Synod on Synodality: Where Has It Been and Where is it Going?

With the calling of a worldwide synod on synodality, Pope Francis set in motion the most extensive consultative process the world has ever seen. In recent months, each diocese produced a report on its listening sessions, which were then synthesized by their national episcopal conferences. The conference reports were sent to Rome, where they were...