Love after the fairy tale
With Valentine’s Day upon us, hearts, flowers, and fairy tales are everywhere.
When I was in my twenties, I wanted to find my soulmate – that perfect guy who loved me unconditionally and with whom I would have a long, always-romantic union. Little did I know I had fallen into a trendy trap.
When I was in my twenties, I wanted to find my soulmate – that perfect guy who loved me unconditionally and with whom I would have a long, always-romantic union. Little did I know I had fallen into a trendy trap.
I managed to avoid the second relationship trap that Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell describe in their book I… Do? as hyper-individualism. Society is telling young women that marriage and motherhood constrain them and lead to unhappiness. Sociologist Brad Wilcox has studied the polling data and has found that women who are married with kids are twice as likely to be very happy with their lives compared to single, childless women.
Now, lest my husband gets the wrong idea when he reads this, I’d like to clarify what I said at the start. I did find that perfect guy, but it’s not perfection in the sense of no flaws. He’s the perfect guy for me. And, yes, I do think we were meant to be together, but I also look at our relationship with eyes both of love and reality.
It’s true that fewer people are getting married. It is also true that those who do get married report being significantly happier than their single counterparts.
In his book Get Married, Brad Wilcox gives these facts:
- Married couples are 40 per cent more likely to be very happy compared to singles.
- Life expectancy is longer, with fewer health issues.
- Married couples are 50 per cent less likely to have depression.
- The median wealth of married couples is four times higher than singles.
Even more interesting are the common priorities shared by the ‘very happy’ couples. Wilcox calls them the five ‘C’s.’
Communion – a we-before-me approach. They share last names, bank accounts, and have regular date nights.
Children – they view raising them as a primary goal. Couples that have regular family fun time reported being 10 per cent happier and families that do chores together reported being 17 per cent happier!
Cash – happy couples share assets. As well, employed men were less likely to divorce whereas, if a woman was unemployed, the divorce rate was not affected.
Community – happier couples are surrounded by others who take marriage and family life seriously. By contrast, Wilcox found that divorce was 70 per cent more likely if a close contact divorced.
Christ the lifeline: Archbishop reaffirms commitment to reconciliation at St. Paul’s Squamish Nation Church
Archbishop Richard Smith drew on Indigenous imagery to speak about faith and reconciliation at St. Paul’s Squamish Nation Church in North Vancouver, telling parishioners that Christ is the weaver who binds humanity together.
“When we share faith in Him, we are brought together as his people and we are created by the Lord into something of astonishing beauty,” he said in his homily during the pastoral visit.
Archbishop Smith met with Squamish Nation elders, a meeting he personally requested. “We talked and shared stories for almost two hours,” he said. “The non-Indigenous—our country broadly—has so much to learn from Indigenous ways, from the traditions, from the culture, from the learnings.”
Reflecting on the ceremonial paddle he was given by the Squamish First Nation when he arrived in Vancouver last year, he recalled elders telling him the paddle was a lifeline, necessary for traversing the water in a canoe. Christ is the same, he said, “Jesus is our eternal lifeline. He, and he alone, is the one sent by the father to lead us to heaven.”
Many people in the world today “need to be thrown that lifeline,” he said. “There is great suffering in our world today. There is a great sense of loneliness” amid the world’s “fracturing” and “division,” from warring nations to families.
During his visit, Archbishop Smith was shown Indigenous baskets made of cedar root and cherry bark, an image he used to reflect on Christ’s role in uniting humanity. Christians, he said, are like a basket woven together by Jesus himself. “Who does the weaving? [It’s Jesus,] because he is the lifeline,” he said, “the one who does the intricate interweaving that brings humanity together.”
As he finished his homily, he reaffirmed the Archdiocese of Vancouver’s commitment to truth and reconciliation. “I want you to know—I want the people to know—that I am committed, and the Archdiocese is committed to that ever-closer interweaving among ourselves,” he said.
“My hope and my prayer is that as we grow in reconciliation—the Church and Indigenous peoples together—as we look at that basket as see it as symbolic of the interwovenness that we want to exist between ourselves.”
He ended with a call to work together, asking the Lord “to interweave us so that we will become a beacon for others that says unity and reconciliation is possible.”
Hope is real and tangible, he said, “and we can touch it the more deeply that we are reconciled with one another.
When an app outlives its creator
OpenClaw, Clawdbots, Moltbots, Moltbooks, Claude Code, GPT 5.3, Grok Imagine, Opus 4.6, agentic AI, AGI, ASI … so much for tech terms in the news as I write this column.
Do you ever get the feeling that you can’t keep up with the breakneck speed of technological evolution? “Evolution” doesn’t even seem an appropriate word for the circumstances.
In recent days, one of my niche areas of interest, amateur radio, lost an innovator, Elwood Downey, who created and operated a widely used application called HamClock. Although it had started life as just that, a clock display with various time formats radio people use, it had morphed over time into a very sophisticated interface giving tremendous detail about radio signal propagation and space weather metrics.
Those in the amateur radio field learned of his passing through a note he left on his website and through an auto-response email. Not only did it announce his passing, but it noted his HamClock service would cease to run in June of this year.
Now you might think programs don’t just cease to work spontaneously. Well, in this case, HamClock was heavily dependent on what we call a server backend, with associated internet domain names. It will indeed cease to function.
Cease to function because domain names expire, servers require electricity to operate, and telecommunications utilities have fees for their operation. You get the idea. Someone was paying bills behind the scenes to keep the HamClock service operational, with most end users completely unaware of the magnanimity involved.
In the days following his passing, two teams, and later others, set to work almost immediately to see if they could duplicate the legacy of Mr. Downey’s HamClock. As I write this column, not yet a week later, both have managed to achieve working versions, one team almost duplicating the original, the other taking a from-the-ground-up approach and making use of modern web-interface coding constructs not available when HamClock originally took to screens across the world.
This new work to ensure HamClock lives on, either directly as it is today or in some modified form, raises interesting questions about content we access over the internet from a privately owned resource site. What should happen to such a site when its owner passes away? Are there legal issues that arise? Is the look and feel of an internet resource subject to a form of copyright, for instance?
In the case of HamClock, we have a partial answer. The actual part of HamClock, which users interact with directly, installed locally on either a Raspberry Pi computer or on a Windows laptop through the Linux subsystem, carries an MIT license. Essentially, this means the look and feel can be copied without legal issue.
At 200 years, Oblates reflect on the heart of their mission
In Western Canada — including British Columbia and the Vancouver region — the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate played a foundational role in establishing parishes, missions, and pastoral life. As the congregation prepares to mark the 200th anniversary of the papal approval of its Constitutions and Rules on Feb. 17, its Superior General is inviting Oblates and the wider Church to reflect on what lies at the heart of their missionary charism today. The homily below was delivered Jan. 24, 2026 by Father Luis Ignacio Rois Alonso, OMI.
Today we celebrate the 210th anniversary of the beginning of our community and missionary life. We do so in 2026, the year in which we also mark the bicentennial of our pontifical approval. As we hold these two moments together, I am drawn back to the first ten years of our history, a time that shaped who we are.
In 1826, our Institute was a small group of eighteen members. Several had already left, including some of the pioneers, and the community faced opposition from certain bishops and members of the clergy. The Society that Pope Leo XII would approve was, in the Founder’s own words, weak, small, poor, and modest. And yet, there was something within it that moved the Pope to approve it.
Certainly, the Oblates had put everything on the line to preach the Gospel to the most abandoned, and the method introduced by De Mazenod and his companions was bearing fruit. The Founder’s personal charism may also have played a role: a French prelate who spoke Italian and who had assisted the cardinals during their exile in Paris while still a seminarian. The ecclesial context of the time may have contributed as well. But was all of this enough to justify the approval of the Institute?
Saint Eugène de Mazenod read this approval as an act of God’s Providence. We, too, can read it in this way. And if this approval was willed by God, then it is right for us to ask ourselves: what was it about our Society that received this grace? What was planted in Aix that could grow into the tree we know today, 210 years later?
This Jubilee year gives us a privileged opportunity to return to what is essential in our charism. Each of us is called to take this question personally, listening for what God is saying and what He is asking of us. To believe that our charism comes from God draws us more deeply into this discernment, because we must discover how to respond to His grace. That response calls us to give the best of ourselves.
Catholic bishops join MPs in push to restrict MAiD
Two legislative efforts to limit Canada’s MAiD framework converged Thursday, with Conservative MP Garnett Genuis announcing a bill focused on MAiD coercion and the Catholic bishops supporting legislation to prohibit assisted dying for mental illness.
Conservative MP Garnett Genuis introduced a private member’s bill Feb. 5 that would amend the Criminal Code to prohibit any federal or provincial government employee in a position of authority, other than a doctor or nurse, from initiating a discussion about medical assistance in dying.
Genuis said Bill C-260, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (medical assistance in dying — protection against coercion), comes in response to numerous stories of counsellors suggesting MAiD to persons such as military veterans or disabled men and women who are seeking support, not death.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) issued a statement the same day strongly supporting Langley MP Tamara Jansen’s private member’s Bill C-218, which would prevent persons whose sole medical condition is mental illness from accessing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (“MAiD”).
The statement from the CCCB’s permanent council, its most authoritative body between annual plenary assemblies, said Bill C-218 “would be a constructive step” toward limiting euthanasia and protecting individuals with mental illness.
The bishops noted the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has called on Canada to rescind “Track 2 MAiD,” which allows euthanasia for those whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, and to permanently exclude MAiD for persons whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.
The bishops also called on the federal government “to allow free conscience voting on this matter, given its profound moral and social implications.”
They said current research indicates mental illness is “not necessarily irremediable” and called for improved access to mental illness treatment and palliative care.
At a news conference in Ottawa, Genuis said his Bill C-260 would clarify MAiD laws by explicitly covering coercive situations such as counselling sessions.
The Member of Parliament for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan said the bill is aimed at countering the “discrimination and coercion” that “undermine the experience of persons trying to access supports that they are entitled to.”
He cited the example of Nicolas Bergeron, a 46-year-old Quebec man, who was not interested in medically facilitated death. “But a social worker, who came to his house for an entirely different reason, repeatedly tried to push him to change his mind,” Genuis said.
Genuis said the counsellor presented Bergeron with “a very bleak, worst-case scenario for his illness and told him that sometimes you just have to stop fighting … This is wrong and this is not a one-off. This MAiD coercion by non-experts in positions of authority is part of a troubling pattern.”
Accommodating Catholic health care presence and conscience
This is the third part in a series about Church-provided health care in Canada to mark National Catholic Health Care Week, Feb. 1–7.
Catholic health care has long been part of Canada’s publicly funded health-care system, caring for patients of every faith and background in a moral tradition that places human dignity at the centre of care.
That dual role has always required careful navigation. Catholic institutions and professionals work within the public system while trying to honour conscience, professional responsibility, and the common good at the same time.
In Catholic facilities, decisions are shaped by principles that stress respect for life, care for the vulnerable, and moral responsibility in professional practice. For clinicians, nurses, and support staff, conscience is not an abstract idea. It is part of daily work, influencing how they walk with patients and families through illness, suffering, and death.
In B.C., those ethical tensions have sometimes been felt sharply. A case now before the B.C. Supreme Court is examining whether faith-based hospitals can be required to provide euthanasia on-site.
In recent years, The B.C. Catholic obtained documents from the Fraser Health Authority showing that assisted-dying policies created “ethical dilemmas” for some clinical staff, with at least one senior palliative-care physician choosing to resign rather than take part in practices that conflicted with his convictions.
The pressure doesn’t arise only when responding to patient requests. Sean Murphy, administrator of the Protection of Conscience Project, has warned that newer federal standards increasingly expect clinicians to raise euthanasia themselves. The standards say practitioners must suggest euthanasia and assisted suicide “to patients who have expressed no interest in it simply because the patient might be ‘eligible’ for it,” Murphy said.
Ethical change in health care does not happen only through legislation. It also takes shape through processes that influence public expectations. Marian Neels, president of the B.C. Life Network, said federal consultations on assisted dying reflect a gradual effort to build acceptance of advance requests. “Their strategy is basically about getting people used to the idea, slowly but steadily getting the word out,” said Neels. “After a while you just kind of become desensitized.”
Faith-based health care responds to these pressures differently in different countries. In the United States, Catholic bishops and health-care leaders have often challenged government policy through formal legal and regulatory processes to protect institutional conscience.
In Canada, accommodation has more often been worked out within the publicly funded system itself. Canada’s legal framework has recognized freedom of conscience and religion as protected rights, even within public systems.
In comments to Canadian Press earlier this year, Rev. Dr.
Patron saint for a fractured world
The Vatican recently released two documents that matter not only to The B.C. Catholic but to our fractured world.
Both speak to how we communicate and relate to one another in an age being reshaped by technology. Their timing is not accidental. Both were released as the Church marked the feast of St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists and communicators.
In his 2026 World Day of Social Communications message, Pope Leo XIV warned about the “anthropological challenge” of our time: the temptation to trade the “sacredness of the human voice and face” for the “simulated empathy” of artificial intelligence.
At the same time, in a letter to the Catholic media in France, the Pope reminded them that the antidote to a polarized, AI-driven culture can be found in the “reasons of the heart” and the “centrality of good relationships.”
It is at moments like this that we appreciate having St. Francis de Sales as a patron. Just over a century ago, in his 1923 encyclical Rerum Omnium Perturbationem, Pope Pius XI offered Francis de Sales as a model for an age of “confusion, division, and interior unrest.” He described the saint’s life as a program for restoring a disordered world, not through power, ideology, or coercion, but through interior holiness, gentleness, and quiet fidelity.
A century later, that message is just as relevant, perhaps more so. In a culture addicted to outrage rather than persuasion, distraction rather than reflection, and impulse rather than discipline, St. Francis de Sales offers a counter-culture of gentleness, clarity, and a formed interior life. His most famous quote still rings true: “Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength.”
Pope Francis echoed that same vision in 2022 in his Apostolic Letter Totum Amoris Est, issued for the 400th anniversary of the saint’s death. He wrote that Francis de Sales recognized that times were changing, and that those changes were not a threat to the Gospel, but an opportunity: “The word of God that he had loved from his youth now opened up before him new and unexpected horizons in a rapidly changing world. That same task awaits us in this, our own age of epochal change.”
Pope Pius XI made a similar point, noting that Francis de Sales showed how holiness is the vocation of every Christian, in every state of life. He warned that “the great need of our day is to curb the unmeasured desires of mankind.”
The wisdom of Francis de Sales speaks as well to the 21st century as it did to the 17th. In his message to the French Catholic media, Pope Leo XIV said Catholic journalists have a responsibility in a polarized world to tell the stories of those who suffer and those who work for peace, to in effect become the “antennae that pick up and retransmit what the weak, the marginalized, those who are alone and need to know the joy of feeling loved are experiencing.”
Miracles of body and heart at Lourdes
Miracles still happen today.
At the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes (feast day Feb. 11) in Lourdes, Hautes-Pyrenees, France, 72 cures have been recognized since the Virgin Mary’s first apparition. The most current miracle was proclaimed just last year.
Antonia Raco, a 67-year-old Italian woman diagnosed with primary lateral sclerosis (PLS) in 2006, went on a pilgrimage with the Italian organization UNITALSI in July 2009. Antonia went into the baths and felt an unexpected sense of well-being and the ability to walk again. In August and September of the same year, medical checkups revealed her symptoms had disappeared.
In 2010, she reported that her cure came from visiting the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes. After numerous investigations, a medical consensus declared her case valid, and her bishop proclaimed the miracle on April 16, 2025.
Just like Antonia, I too was searching for a cure when, in October 2012, I walked the path to the baths in Lourdes. I was on a pilgrimage in Spain to celebrate the beatification of Don Alvaro, the second prelate of Opus Dei, and our group took a side trip to the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes. We stayed in a very old hotel near the sanctuary, which was only a 15-minute walk away.
I was so excited to exercise my French-speaking skills and to visit the place where St. Bernadette saw visions of Mary. I went to Mass, spent time in the adoration chapel, and prayed the Stations of the Cross, walking throughout the grounds and lighting candles. I filled little bottles with the spring water and drank it like I had never tasted water before.
The more I learned about St. Bernadette and the apparitions of Our Lady, the more I wanted to find healing for my mind in the sanctuary. Unfortunately, the lineup to the baths was too long and the doors had been closed.
I was hoping for a miracle to cure my mental illness, but God had other plans, and the miracle I received was spiritual rather than physical.
My visit to the shrine was not in vain. I felt a deep sense of gratitude and spiritual connection to Mary and Jesus. My faith was strengthened even if I didn’t receive the healing for my mind that I was seeking. Sometimes our prayers aren’t answered in the way or the timeframe we want, but our prayers are always answered. God blesses us and gives us tangible ways to connect to him.
In 1858, Mary appeared 18 times to young Marie Bernard (St. Bernadette) Soubirous with the message of “personal conversion, prayer, and charity.” Like the spring water that bubbled up in the grotto where Mary appeared, we too can see his goodness through the miracles of others and our own personal conversion.
Let our light shine before others
5th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 58:6-10
Second Reading: 1 Cor 2:1-5
Gospel Reading: Jn 8:12
“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus told his disciples, “but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”
God became man to free us from slavery to the devil, through whom death had entered the world, and to bring us supernatural life. “I came that they might have life, and have it to the full,” he said.
Jesus himself has supernatural life, divine life, God’s life, by nature, because he is begotten by God the Father, who himself has this life by nature. We, who do not have this life by nature, can get it from him by becoming a member of his mystical body, or by being grafted on to him like a branch on to a vine.
That is what happened at our baptism, by the power of God: we were regenerated, or reborn, with supernatural life. Since then, Jesus has nourished this life with his body and blood.
However, we still suffer concupiscence: the disorder and rebellion among our natural powers that we inherit from Adam and Eve. We do not have the integrity, or wholeness, that they had before their fall; we are fragmented, for our natural desires war with our supernatural desires and even among themselves.
In our struggle to keep our supernatural life healthy, we sometimes fall. Then we have to make a sacramental confession: acknowledge what we have done wrong, tell God we are sorry, promise not to do it again, and make reparation, as far as we can. We also have to nourish our supernatural life by receiving communion frequently.
However, it is not good to eat heavily without exercising. If we do not seriously exercise our supernatural life, it will fall ill and die.
This Sunday’s first reading outlines some of the things we have to do: “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.” We must also share our bread with the hungry, shelter the homeless poor, cover the naked, and refrain from speaking evil and judging others.
Then our “light shall break forth like the dawn,” and our “healing shall spring up quickly”; our “vindicator” shall go before us, “the glory of the Lord” shall be our rearguard. Then we can call, and the Lord will answer; we can cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”
Then, by the power of God, we will be able to co-operate (“work together”) with Christ in the salvation of the world: in our own flesh we will “fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the Church,” as St.
Exploring Canada’s living tradition of Catholic health care
A striking convergence of events connected to health care is unfolding in British Columbia, with legal, liturgical, and pastoral elements intersecting.
At the centre is a B.C. Supreme Court trial in Vancouver examining whether religious hospitals can be required to allow practices on their premises that conflict with their moral convictions. The case raises questions that go beyond law and policy, potentially touching on the future shape of Catholic health care in Canada.
The trial began on Monday, Jan. 19, propitiously the feast of St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, one of the earliest figures associated with Catholic care for the sick in what would become Canada. Through her Congregation of Notre Dame, Marguerite and her sisters brought care directly to the ill and vulnerable in 17th-century Montreal, long before formal health systems existed. Their work reflected a missionary model rooted in the Visitation, going out to meet people where they were, especially the sick and the poor.
Depending on the outcome of the trial, that model of care grounded less in brick-and-mortar institutions and more on service could again become a prominent feature of Catholic health ministry, even as Catholic hospitals continue to operate within public systems.
The new St. Paul’s Hospital, shown under construction, will mark a new chapter in Catholic health care in Vancouver. (Providence Health Care photo)
The trial is expected to conclude Feb. 6. Just days later, on Feb. 11, the Church observes the World Day of the Sick, which coincides with the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, a date chosen by St. John Paul II because of Lourdes’ longstanding association with healing and care for the ill.
Following the Marian apparitions in 1858 and the arrival of thousands of sick pilgrims each year, the Church moved beyond informal charity to a system of medical volunteers, including doctors, nurses, religious sisters, and trained lay caregivers, who provided care. The result was one of the earliest large-scale models of pastoral health care, focusing on compassion, accompaniment, and the dignity of the suffering person. It was that understanding of health care as an expression of mercy that John Paul II drew on when he established the World Day of the Sick.
The week after the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes comes Ash Wednesday, which similarly reminds us of human frailty and mortality.
It is in the midst of these moments that National Catholic Health Care Week arrives, when Catholics across Canada are invited to reflect on a tradition shaped by the Church’s healing ministry. Reflected in a post-Jubilee theme of “Open Hearts, Healing, Hope,” the tradition has been defined less by bricks and mortar than by what John Paul II described as making present “the merciful love of God through the care and closeness of others.”