Admin


192 posts

    14 Jul

    It was back in 1969, when a 14 year old girl, Rita Kelly, and her boyfriend, Jeff Doerr, volunteered to sing and bring their electric music into St. Ignatius Church in Winnipeg. This was soon after Vatican II, when the Church had just opened its doors to the cultures, languages and artistic expressions of contemporary society. When these volunteers and the priests all said "yes' to an electric Sunday night Mass, it did not take long before every Sunday night at 9:00pm, they were attracting close to a 1,000 young people to the Church....

    07 Jul

    I look forward to answering this question every year on the occasion of ordinations to the diaconate and priesthood. As rector of Regis College and superior of the Regis Jesuit Community, it is my responsibility to present candidates for ordination to the bishop, but only after they have been judged to be very well prepared. It is a huge responsibility with which I am accountable to the people of God. The people expect and deserve priests who will help them find God. Those who are ordained must be worthy, capable and committed to serve....

    28 Jun

    William Allan Peterkin– was clearly spoken with due respect and without the slightest hurry, in its proper position in the alphabetical listing of 182 men and women, who for the academic year 2012-2013 had donated their bodies to science, to the Division of Anatomy in the Department of Surgery at the University of Toronto....

    26 Jun

    Part of the tertianship experience for Jesuits entails ministering to the very poor. It is an experiment that forms what Ignatius would say the school of the heart. This was the case during my experiment in Tamale, a northern city in Ghana. I spent six weeks volunteering at a clinic, Shekhina (in Hebrew, God's dwelling), run by a convert to the Catholic faith, Dr. David Abdulai who freely offers medical care for the very poor of Ghana. In effect, the curing ministry of Dr. Abdulai is so Gospel-inspiring in his radical generosity in our post-modern Christianity. His clinic, no doubt, embodies the Ignatian understanding of school of the heart – the heart that understands the needs of the poor, generously serves them and in the process discovers God anew....

    02 Jun

    What do we want for those we love? I don't think we have to look too deeply into our hearts to discover the answer: we want those whom we love to be alive and well and with us forever. But our love is not strong enough to bring that about. Those whom we love get sick, and if the sickness is serious enough there is little we can do about it. Those whom we love die, and we can do nothing about that. We ourselves get sick and die, and those who love us can do nothing about that. So it would seem that love is not stronger than death....

    26 May

    Terrence Malick's recent beautiful and downright frustrating film "To the Wonder" offers us deeper insight that goes beyond the typical notion that regulates the Spirit to either the cognitive or emotive dimension. Though Malick does not explicitly deal with the Spirit, its anonymous presence exudes in the film. Yet, a word of caution, this is a film that I do not recommend for people seeking easy answers, because the film is painfully slow and does not give concrete resolutions. It seduces you with gorgeous sceneries, an amazing score, and the question of love....

    22 May

    When I was a young altar server at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Toronto (OLPH-- Old Ladies playing hockey) I remember how pitiful the Easter Vigil had become. (This was in the 1950's) It was held not after dark, as now, but Saturday morning. Very few people attended. Besides myself and the presiding priest there were only a handful of participants....

    15 May

    It was in the summer of 1963 that I pulled off my novitiate caper. We were in the midst of our summer holiday. The novice master, Fr. Len Fischer--who would later work with me in Northern Ontario--was away for his holiday too. I approached the prison chaplain, Fr. Charlie Carroll, and suggested that we could field a ball team and challenge the inmates to a game--on their turf of course. And so it happened that one evening a paddy wagon arrived at our door and whisked our makeshift team to prison. The stands surrounding the prison ball field were packed with their fellow-prisoners. We had two fans--Fr. Redden a former lawyer, and the prison chaplain....

    08 Apr

    The early Celtic Christians had a wonderful saying that reflects their Easter faith. Their goal and vocation in life was to "wander this earth seeking their place of resurrection." This evocative idea is reflected in the lives of some famous Irish saints including St. Patrick. Most Irish saints seemed to know when their hour of death was near. So when Patrick's time came he wanted to be buried in Armagh, his Episcopal centre. His guardian spirit from the time of his teenage captivity pointed him in another direction and ordered him to "return to the place from which you came."...

    Show more
    Loading...

Subscribe to igNation

Subscribe to receive our latest articles delivered right to your inbox!