Peter Stockland

Some will sniff that a hierarchical Church is hardly an institution to concern itself with authoritarian politics. Others will snort that if the Church in question is the Roman Catholic Church, it would be better to spend its energies repenting and repairing its past than meddling in our political p…

I once interviewed the Irish Times columnist and author John Waters, a very devout and public Catholic, about changes roiling through Irish society that were creating pressures to amend the Constitution in areas such as abortion and gay marriage. I noted that despite the Church’s long dominance over Irish politics, an equally long-standing antipathy toward it could be found in figures such as James Joyce. Waters replied: “Peter, the Catholic Church in Ireland never cared for James Joyce either,…

Cardinal Collins to be Chancellor of new centre

About 10 days before Montreal Auxiliary Bishop Francis Leo was installed at the 11th Archbishop of Toronto, succeeding retired Archbishop Thomas Collins, he generously made time in a frantic schedule of meetings and moving cities to sit down for an interview with The Catholic Register. As the interview began in his offices on the sixth floor of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Centre in Toronto, I told Leo that I’d made a conscious decision not to ask him for his position on the innumerable storms of t…

About a decade ago, I concluded that the underlying affliction in North American society is potato chips. On a car ride from Kingston to Ottawa, I tested my hypothesis on Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and my then-colleague Fr. Raymond de Souza, with whom I co-founded Convivium magazine. Both of...

The absence of human remains following excavations at Manitoba’s former Pine Creek Indian Residential school has attracted international attention in the form of a highly critical article in the New York Post. “After two years of horror stories about the alleged mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains,” New York Post investigative reporter Dana Kennedy wrote in an Aug. 31 story. “Som…

Calgary Bishop emeritus Henry honoured for challenging residential schools’ consensus

Former PM warns terror will spread to Canada if Hamas and Iran succeed

The scene had a loopy, feckless, cosplay pathos about it. Then I discerned the menace. I came face-to-face not with the dictatorship of the proletariat, but with the dictates of the phone-atariat. After some purportedly pro-Palestinian protesters “occupied” the front lawn of Montreal’s McGill Univer...

A deeply prayerful celebration greeted the return of 62 Indigenous artifacts to Canada from the Vatican at Montreal’s Trudeau Airport Dec. 6.