Category: BC Catholic

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 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.”

With the sun shining on the waves, Archbishop Richard Smith made a pastoral visit to Vancouver’s port ministry, accompanying port chaplains in their duties supporting the spiritual welfare of docked seafarers and ship workers.

The Archbishop toured the facilities with Father Pereira, the national director of Stella Maris Canada, Deacon Dileep Athaide, and long-time ship-visiting volunteer Douglas McDonald, as they performed their duties at the Port of Vancouver.

Port Chaplain Father Eslin Pereira, CMF, said the Archdiocese of Vancouver Apostleship of the Sea team was grateful for the Archbishop’s visit and support. The visit included a meeting with the Port Ecumenical Centre’s Mission to Seafarers administrator, Rev. Peter Smyth, who gave a guided tour of the Vancouver waterfront Seafarers Centre and an overview of the activities and services available to visiting seafarers.

Archbishop Smith also toured a cargo vessel loading Canadian-grown barley at the Alliance Grain Terminal, one of the many independent dock operators along the south side of Burrard Inlet harbour. He met with the ship’s all-Filipino, mostly Catholic, crew of 21, who were thrilled to have the Archbishop visit their ship and to share with him a bit about their work and life aboard.

“It was a real joy to meet the crew aboard the cargo vessel and to spend time with these hardworking men, many of whom are far from their families for long stretches of time,” Archbishop Smith told The B.C. Catholic. “I was grateful for the opportunity to listen to their stories and pray together.”

The Archbishop also thanked port ministry workers and volunteers for being a “powerful sign of the Church’s care for those who are often unseen yet essential to our daily lives.”

“I am deeply grateful for the faithful service of all who ensure seafarers are welcomed, supported, and reminded of their God-given dignity,” he said.

The Apostleship of the Sea is an international Catholic ministry dedicated to the pastoral care of seafarers and their families. It was established in Scotland in 1920 to meet the spiritual and practical needs of sailors who often spent long periods far from home.

In its early years, Stella Maris operated hostels where seafarers could find rest and companionship while their ships were in port, supported by parish volunteers who offered hospitality and guidance.

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A Vancouver pro-life activist has been charged with mischief after being arrested Jan. 6 during a four-hour protest outside Every Woman’s Health Centre on Commercial Drive.

Lane Walker, 62, who lives in the Downtown Eastside in an intentional interdenominational Christian community, said he was initially charged with violating B.C.’s Access to Abortion Services Act. 

Every Woman’s Health Centre is one of several abortion facilities in Metro Vancouver and has previously been the site of protests and counter-protests. 

Walker, 62, has a history of protesting human rights violations and abortion that goes back to the 1980s.

Walker, who although not Catholic attends Mass at St. Paul’s Church near Oppenheimer Park, said he was taken into custody shortly after 3:30 p.m. while protesting outside the clinic at 2525 Commercial Dr. 

Walker said he had been outside the clinic engaging in conversations with members of the public and police officers. He said he told police he intended to openly defy the Access to Abortion Services Act, the provincial legislation that restricts certain forms of expression within designated access zones around abortion clinics. 

He told The B.C. Catholic the police were “exemplar civil servants” who have “a truly difficult job because high-conflict situations can be very stressful.”

Walker said officers approached him and told him to leave the 50-metre access zone around the clinic. After making it clear he intended to stay in protest, he was arrested and read his rights, he said.

Police told him handcuffs would not be used because his demeanour “did not warrant more forceful measures,” he said.

Police were hesitant to arrest him, he said, describing the process as unusual. “I’ve never been served, read my rights and given my court date all at the same time,” he said. 

He said he was initially charged with violation of the Access to Abortion Services Act, but the charge was later reduced to mischief, a decision he believes was made to avoid engaging with the substance of the protest. 

Under the Criminal Code, mischief is conduct that intentionally interferes with the lawful use of property. 

Walker is scheduled to appear in court on March 18.

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“Democracy” is one of the most frequently invoked yet least understood words in contemporary politics. It is used to praise, warn, accuse and moralize. We hear that democracy is “under threat” or that certain views are “undemocratic.” Yet when the word is pressed, divergent notions emerge.

For Catholics, this conceptual fog is not an abstract problem. Because truth is a moral category, political discourse clouded by equivocation threatens our ability to judge rightly. What, then, is the Catholic response to the invocations of democratic values? 

As Jacques Maritain argues in Christianity and Democracy, Catholic thought has long intuited a harmony between human dignity, social services and political participation that are commonly associated with democratic life. Articulating this intuition is, therefore, crucial for both the believer and non-believer today.

A helpful way to illuminate the confusion is to distinguish three meanings of “democracy” that are often conflated: as a form of rule, as a form of association and as equality. Each suggests legitimate political concerns but also aligns differently with Catholic teaching.

The first is democracy as a form of rule, understood in its literal Greek sense: the people are the source of political authority. This definition focuses not on the regime’s character but on the location of power. Many assume this form of democracy is inherently good; but Catholic social teaching is more cautious. The Church values participation and shared responsibility, but has never taught that majority will is automatically legitimate. St. John Paul II warned explicitly against this temptation in Centesimus Annus: a democracy without objective moral reference easily becomes a “thinly disguised totalitarianism” — the arbitrary will of a ruler replaced by the arbitrary will of the majority.

The second meaning is democracy as a form of association, more closely associated with the rule of law or constitutionalism. Here, democracy is not based on who holds power but the structures within which power operates: equal treatment before the law, institutional limits, stable procedures and protections for human rights. This understanding resonates deeply with Catholic thought. A political order that protects the dignity of each person, regardless of social standing, through impartial norms aligns with the Church’s insistence on the intrinsic worth of the human person. Yet, crucially, nothing in this understanding of democracy requires popular rule. A constitutional regime could even be monarchical and still uphold these “democratic” values.

The third meaning takes democracy to imply substantive equality: such a society must guarantee not only equal legal standing but a wide range of social and economic outcomes. Goods like housing, health care and food security — once matters of familial duty, communal responsibility and personal charity — are recast as enforceable entitlements.

3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 9:1-4
Second Reading: 1 Cor 1:10-13, 17-18
 Gospel Reading: Mt 4:12-23

The Church’s Jubilee Year of Hope has ended, but Christian hope has not.

Unfortunately, Catholics have almost ceased to notice that Christian hope “ensues from a real encounter” with God, said Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Spe Salvi (“Saved by Hope”).

Non-Christians try to comfort themselves at funerals with empty promises like, “He’ll never be dead, for we will always remember him.”

A man dying of AIDS told a pastoral worker that he had “no hope.” He burst into tears, sobbing like a child, and cried out, “Tell me how I can have hope!”

In contrast, Christians know that “they have a future,” the Pope said: they do not know “the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness.”

This Sunday’s readings tell us that when God became Man, “the people who walked in darkness” saw “a great light”; “the yoke of their burden” and “the rod of their oppressor” were broken; “anguish and gloom” were replaced by hope.

Jesus “knows even the path that passes through the valley of death,” the Pope said; he walks with us “even on the path of final solitude,” where no one else can accompany us.

“He himself has walked this path, He has descended into the kingdom of death, He has conquered death, and he has returned to accompany us now and to give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through.”

“This was the new hope that arose over the life of believers” when God became Man, he said.

According to the Christian faith, our salvation is not simply a given. In the Second Reading, St. Paul speaks not of “us who have been saved,” but of “us who are being saved.”

No; “redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present,” the Pope said.

Without such hope, life is unbearable, he said. With such hope, we can face poverty, persecution, and even death. “The present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads toward a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey.”

Humans have a profound need for hope, as that AIDS patient realized. “We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day,” the Pope said, “but these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else.

It’s time to make a big liturgical leap — from adoring Baby Jesus in the manger to contemplating Jesus, now an adult, being baptized by his cousin John in the Jordan River.

Since Christmas, the Church has led us rapidly through the Nativity, the visit of the Magi at Epiphany, and now the Baptism of the Lord. This quick progression can feel like a spiritual whirlwind, even a little confusing, especially for children who tend to associate baptism with babies. But the Church places these feasts together deliberately, inviting us to see them as part of a single revelation.

Taken together, these three feasts of Nativity, Epiphany and Baptism are all about telling us who Jesus is. It makes sense, actually, to show the world that this little baby, whose birth was foretold by the Old Testament prophets, is who the shepherds, the Magi and St. John the Baptist say he is. He is the long-awaited Messiah.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to have been present at Jesus’ baptism? St. Matthew tells us, “After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’” (Mt 3:15-17).

Wow. What a scene. The only one who knew for sure that Jesus was the Messiah at this point was St. John the Baptist, so this would have been an earth-shattering moment for those who were present. It’s not every day you hear the voice of God coming from the heavens. And you can bet that word spread pretty quickly, even without Instagram or Facebook. The Jewish people had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries and were keenly aware of the prophecies that were being fulfilled.

This moment of Jesus’ baptism is a culmination of all the prophecies from Advent and the infancy narrative heard at Christmas. First, we are told in Advent to look for the Messiah, to be ready, to repent and stay awake because he is near at hand. Then, with Christmas, he arrives, though, rather shockingly, as a helpless, poor baby born in a dingy manger, but welcomed by choirs of angels and recognized by shepherds and wise men from the East.

When we get to the Baptism, which marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, St. John the Baptist is even reluctant to baptize his man-God cousin because he knows who Jesus is. Matthew says John “tried to prevent him,” saying to Jesus, “I need to be baptized by you and yet you are coming to me?”

The following editorial appeared in the Jan. 11 issue of The Catholic Register.

The familiar claim that war solves nothing must be balanced off with the acknowledged wisdom that peace is not the mere absence of war. It’s wisdom particularly applicable at the start of 2026 when the prospect of war breaking out somewhere in the world is a far greater, more realistic threat than the achievement of everlasting peace for everyone on Earth.

The U.S. military strike against Venezuela on Jan. 3, while absent an actual declaration of war, showed in the very way it caught global leaders off guard how quickly quasi-peace can flare into unnerving, to say the least, bombing of civilian population centres. At the same time, the precision of the assault debunks the nostrum that violence never achieves anything. (So does one of the avowed intentions of returning democracy to Venezuelans.)

Violence, limited and in the hands of an elite military unit, achieved the goal of bringing a handcuffed tyrant before an American court to face the proverbial arms-length list of charges ranging from drug smuggling to narco-terrorism. It’s a better end by far for strongman Nicolás Maduro than the end hundreds of thousands of his subjects suffered under his oligarchic rule.

Our colleagues at OSV News underscored the point with a story quoting Astrid Liden, a Venezuelan-American communications officer for the Hope Border Institute, which works to apply Catholic social teaching to the U.S.-Mexico border region.

“In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have sought protection in the United States, many passing through the U.S.-Mexico border,” Liden told the news service. “Millions of Venezuelans live abroad due to the situation in Venezuela, and we share their hope in the end of the reign of Maduro, whose rule led to the displacement of so many.”

But Liden also stressed the sobering other side of the “successful” raid on Nicolás Maduro’s presidential palace: hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who remained behind in their country of birth are now at risk from the political, economic and social upheaval that has a high probability of following the U.S. strike.

Civil war, of whatever scope and duration, is not out of the question. Even if it is averted, and we should all pray it will be, the people of Venezuela will be reminded for weeks, months, perhaps years that peace is not the mere absence of war.

It is not, of course, either the place or the competence of a Canadian Catholic newspaper to declaim on the rights and wrongs of the American action under international law or the geopolitical complexities that might ensue. This is not Gaza where the unspeakable evil of Hamas on Oct.

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, many of us are divided into two distinct camps: the keeners – the same people who love September for the new pencils and the potential – and those of us who, like Catherine Doherty (foundress of the Madonna House apostolate), believe that with God every moment is the moment of beginning again. Catherine doesn’t think we need a new year to change anything. Every day is New Year’s Day.

Whichever side you take, our culture has decided to hang a lot of hopes on January.

Leila Marie Lawler, author of The Little Oratory and writer about all things home, wrote a wonderfully liberating little piece on resolving to improve in baby steps. “I’m not a minimalist except in resolutions,” she writes. Her delightful advice leaves us lots of breathing room.

Lawler’s list includes things like leaving your phone far away from where you sleep and buying an alarm clock. Other resolutions are to pray, from the heart, five minutes a day, to keep the Sabbath holy (this one made another important list way back in the Old Testament), and to plan the family’s menu.

Both of the heavy-hitter Teresas (Therese of Lisieux and Teresa of Avila) wrote that the closer we get to God, the simpler we become. In Psalm 131, we read David’s lament, “I have not gone after things too great…” In the spirit of David’s humility, we recognize our smallness and cling to the generosity and mercy of God.

We recognize our smallness and powerlessness in our reactions and in our close relationships. The new year offers an opportunity to surrender our interactions to the realm of the Holy Spirit, so that love and gratitude can become our main motivators in all that we do instead of fear of abandonment or rejection. May the Holy Spirit reorient our hearts in love “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Indeed, resolutions are little acts of repentance, or to put it in more positive language, to set out for home again. If we saw the dawn of each year as an opportunity for a joyous homecoming instead of something self-focused, the necessary changes would feel more like a relief than a burden.

There is one thing necessary for the new year, every year, and that is the awareness of Christ’s presence in our midst.

In the Lorica of St. Patrick, an ancient prayer commonly known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate, St. Patrick knows exactly what he has to do: seal all entry points of the enemy by firmly rooting himself in Christ.

This prayer could very well be the January prayer of the Catholic: “I arise today, through God’s strength to pilot me: God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s host to secure me.”

As the Jubilee Year of Hope draws to a close, Archbishop Richard Smith is calling Catholics to carry the spiritual graces of the Jubilee into the year ahead through renewed prayer, service, and evangelization.

In his New Year’s message dated Jan. 1, 2026, Archbishop Smith said the hope received during the Jubilee must now be lived as he urged Catholics to become “diligent stewards” of that hope in their daily lives.

Looking ahead to 2026, the Archbishop asked for the coming year to be marked by concrete action, including strengthening parish renewal, deepening prayer and discipleship, fostering healing, and accompanying others in returning to the Church.

He emphasized the central role of the Eucharist, noting that the paschal mystery celebrated at Mass provides the strength needed to sustain evangelization and service.

Archbishop Smith encouraged Catholics to enter the new year with confidence in Christ, openness to the Holy Spirit, and a willingness to witness to the hope they have received. He said the hope kindled during the Jubilee should not remain private, but spread outward to transform lives and renew the world through the Church’s shared mission.

The Archbishop ended his message by entrusting the Archdiocese to the intercession of Our Lady of Hope, asking for her to continue guiding parishes, schools, and ministries in the year ahead.

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