“You’re a sad little man.”

It was nice to see the National Catholic Reporter (Jan. 26, 2007) flag as one of its memorable quotes, the stunningly obtuse and utterly pompous remark of Bishop Robert Lennon of Boston. “You’re a sad little man.” Lennon, then an auxiliary bishop in Boston, was trying to stop Joe Cultrera from filming exterior shots of [...]

The Devil made him do it

Sula,formerly known as Rose, greeted me with a warm smile in my favourite Greek restaurant in Toronto’s Greek town last night.I introduced her to my daughter Chris and Sula immediately launched into the story of why I call her Rose. A couple of years ago I was dining witbh a priest friend and she overheard [...]

The Palestinian Catastrophe

Recently I heard Robert Massoud, the man behind Zatoun, a small Palestinian-Canadian initiative to lend some needed solidarity to the beleaguered people of the West Bank and Gaza. Robert is doing some creative work “watering the plants” doing something positive to help Palestinian farmers who regularly see this historic indigenous crop uprooted. His talk was [...]

Looking out for #1, Condoleeza Rice

How did a woman come out of nowhere so fast, hide her personal life and become the worst Secretary of Defense in living memory?Only those in the American black community know and many won’t tell. It’s the old story in any minority community: do you slag one of your own even if she is part [...]

The Fog of War

Recently TVO showed the riveting Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War, the anguished mea culpa of the former U.S. Secretary of War, Robert McNamara.At the end of the film he speaks T.S. Eliot’s famous lines: We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we [...]

The speech GW Bush should have given

“My fellow Americans. Iraq is going to hell in a handbag. So the whole shebang doesn’t collapse into mayhem and madness, we need to send in 21,000 more troops. So I’ve just wired King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and told him to send them. “My missive to the monarch reads: Dear Abdullah. It’s time your [...]

Fintan the Unforgettable

On the morning of the winter solstice , the darkest night of the year,Fintan Kilbride slipped peacefully away in the palliative unit of Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital. The quiet man who had brought so much light and hope into the lives of the young here and abroad left behind a legacy of such overwhelming goodness [...]

Vatican takes the high road on Saddam’s execution

The late,great Toronto rabbi Reuben Slonim in his arresting autobiography To Kill a Rabbi opined that Israel began to default on its early promise of “lor goyim”, a light unto the Gentiles, when it made an exception to capital punishment and hung the pathetic manager of the Holocaust, Adolph Eichmann. Slonim’s reasoning was simple: in [...]