Category: BC Catholic

Young Catholics discerning a career in medicine face not only long years of training, but also the challenge of navigating a health-care culture that often demands ideological conformity. On March 7, a panel of Catholic physicians hopes to help students face that reality with clarity, confidence, and faith.

A panel of Catholic medical professionals will meet at Holy Name Church in Vancouver to help young people considering medical careers better understand the beauty of medicine and answer their questions about navigating the necessary training and education.

The event is being moderated and organized by Vancouver family physician Dr. Christopher Ryan, who, with his wife, bioethicist Dr. Yuriko Ryan, is a parishioner at Corpus Christi in Vancouver.

He told The B.C. Catholic the event was inspired by post-Mass conversations with young people curious about working in medicine.

The enthusiasm of local health-care professionals to join the panel has impressed Ryan. He quickly had seven panellists and hopes to have more by the time of the event, representing nursing, pharmacy, and a range of medical specialties. 

“I don’t think that in my lifetime my faith or beliefs were threatened as they are now,” he said. “I think that this is a time to stand up.”

What gives him hope is seeing young people “who are taking their lives and their vocations seriously, standing up for what’s right, and being brave.”

The goal of the event is to help even more young people do just that. While the landscape of health-care training has become more ideological, Ryan believes there are more opportunities than ever for those considering medicine, and they’re all open to practising Catholics. He hopes the panel will help students navigate an increasingly progressive interview process.

He says the public imagination has stagnated on the value of doctors’ personal values, especially if they are religious, and many question the need for Catholic health care or Catholics in medicine. He considers such thinking shortsighted, noting the value of a physician who shares their patient’s perspective on religion and spirituality.

He values having a Christian doctor with whom he has “shared goals, beliefs, respect and understanding.” A Catholic doctor offers the “extra benefits of faith and belief in God and his grace,” bringing consolation that another doctor might struggle to provide.

“We know that God loves us and that there is a life thereafter,” Ryan said. “Having that confidence and maturity is a really great thing to share with [your patient].”

Ryan recalled a conversation with his wife, the other Dr.

Shelly remembers the first time she encountered Sancta Maria House. A small prayer card had blown through the air and landed on her boot. On one side was a picture of a happy-looking woman with the words “thank you God for hearing my prayer and answering it.” On the other side was a phone number.

Shelly, a survivor of domestic abuse, had spent years of her life with a man who didn’t love her, and even when she finally left him at 32, drug abuse was waiting in her next relationship.

“I didn’t know there was an ending to it,” she said. “I didn’t know there was a solution, and I certainly didn’t know there was a God.”

She felt “instant change” when she walked through the door of Sancta Maria House. “I felt something that I hadn’t felt in a long time, if ever. I felt a belonging. I felt hope.”

Shelly is now a house parent at Sancta Maria House and she wants others to know there is help. “[My] humble prayer was ‘God help me to figure out why I’m doing this. Help me to stop. And help me to be able to help others.’”

Sancta Maria House is one of several beneficiaries of the Living Waters Fund, a grant program supported by the 2025 Archbishop’s Dinner to help ministries and organizations that help women find safety and healing from domestic abuse and drug use.

The fund supports safe refuge and long-term support for women fleeing abuse, outreach to women on the streets and those affected by sexual exploitation, assistance for single mothers building stable lives, and healing for women facing trauma and injustice. New applications will be accepted from March 1 to 31. 

Sancta Maria House

Since opening its doors on Valentine’s Day 1960, Sancta Maria House has been a quiet and persistent force for good in the Kitsilano neighbourhood, helping women battling substance abuse find their footing and reclaim their lives.

Through its structured, abstinence-based program, women find a nurturing, family-like setting. In addition to the costs of running the centre, donations help pay for activities and services offered to residents, including arts and crafts and faith studies.

Donations also help buffer women from financial strain while seeking stability, allowing them to stay while their applications for government aid are being processed.

Sancta Maria House has part of the life of St. Augustine’s Parish in Kitsilano, women encouraged to take part in parish life and rediscover a sense of belonging. Over its history, Sancta Maria House has helped more than 300 women, ensuring each resident hears a message of love and finds a path toward renewal.

In recent weeks, we invited readers and health-care professionals to share stories about why Catholic health care matters. The response was thoughtful and deeply personal. The following reflection from a longtime nurse practitioner at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver offers a firsthand account of how faith shapes care in daily practice.

I have been a nurse practitioner at St. Paul’s Hospital since 2006. Over the years, I have had many opportunities to leave for other health authorities, yet I have made a deliberate choice to remain at Providence Health Care. What has kept me here is not convenience or habit, but a deep personal conviction and sense of vocation rooted in our mission: “Inspired by the healing ministry of Jesus Christ, Providence Health Care is a Catholic health care community dedicated to meeting the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs of those served through compassionate care, teaching, and research.”

That mission is not abstract. I have seen it lived out in quiet, ordinary, deeply human moments—moments that felt unmistakably different because they occurred within a Catholic health care setting.

Meeting patients where they are

While working in the heart failure clinic, I cared for a man who was recently widowed, living alone, and approaching the end of life with advanced heart failure. Simply getting to the hospital for outpatient appointments was overwhelming for him. Even walking from the HandyDART drop-off to the fifth-floor clinic caused significant physical distress.

At that time, our clinic was not structured to offer home visits. Yet when I requested them, the clerical team moved quickly and creatively to make it possible. I visited him at home several times.

Yes, his symptoms were better managed. His physical suffering was eased. But what remains with me most vividly are the conversations—about his wife, whom he dearly loved and had recently lost, and about his passion for cooking for her. He was profoundly lonely, and that loneliness caused a suffering no medication could address. Those visits offered companionship, dignity, and presence. They alleviated his isolation and accompanied him through to his natural death.

Being seen and heard

Another patient in the heart failure clinic, also nearing the end of life, attended visits with his wife. His cardiac symptoms were reasonably controlled, but his most distressing complaint was something seemingly small: a severely painful ingrown toenail.

Once again, our clerical team helped arrange a home visit, which was not a standard option. I could not treat the toenail myself, but I took his concern seriously and referred him directly to a compassionate podiatrist in the community who also practised at St. Paul’s Hospital. He died a few months later.

Eight years after his death, his wife went out of her way to find me working in the atrial fibrillation clinic.

2nd Sunday of Lent, Year A
First Reading: Gen 12:1-4
Second Reading: 2 Tim 1:8b-10
Gospel Reading: Mt 17:1-9
By Rev. V.J. Hawkswell

This Sunday’s First Reading describes how God called Abram. By this call, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, God began gathering his people into his one Church.

The Gospel Reading describes how Jesus chose Peter, James, and John and “was transfigured before them.” This event, just six days after Peter had recognized Jesus as the Son of God and Jesus had chosen Peter as the rock on which he would build his Church, “confirms Peter’s confession,” says the Catechism.

Thus Abram and Peter were called and chosen for pivotal roles in God’s saving plan. Are we envious, or are we thankful that we ourselves are not chosen and called in this way? Is it a blessing or a curse to be chosen?

The truth is that God has chosen us; he does choose us and calls us “with a holy calling,” as St. Paul says in the Second Reading. The Catechism confirms that we are all, no matter our state of life, “called to holiness,” to “the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity.” As Jesus said, “You must be made perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Holiness means “ever more intimate union with Christ,” the Catechism explains. We enter it through the sacraments. In Christ’s Mystical Body, we enter into the intimate union of the Holy Trinity, and in the Holy Trinity we find the happiness for which God made us.

However, the Catechism stresses, “the way of perfection passes by way of the cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle.”

Renunciation is precisely the business of Lent. Through self-denial, we cultivate detachment from this world in order to become more firmly attached to heaven.

“Many people today—even some Christians—misunderstand Christian self-denial,” says Scott Hahn in his book Lord, Have Mercy. “They try to dismiss it as psychologically sick, world-hating, dour, joyless, and masochistic.”

There are two misunderstandings here, he says.

First, Jesus himself said, “If a man wishes to come after Me, he must deny his very self, take up his cross, and begin to follow in My footsteps.” Self-denial “is not optional”; there is no “alternative, self-indulgent way of salvation.”

Second, self-denial is not “a denial of the goodness of the world. Christians sacrifice the best of things not because they think the world is evil and must be put to death, but because they know the world is very good—so good that it can distract us from what’s far better.” We are tempted to enjoy its good and pleasant pastimes rather than going to confession or Mass or visiting our grandmother in the nursing home.

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.

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.

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.

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.