Ten years ago the television series Due South went off the air. Don’t remember it? The first-ever Canadian-made series on an American network prime-time schedule, Due South was also one of the more popular series on Canadian television. The friendly Mountie in America was the premise, using Canadian politeness, cleverness and kindness to capture Chicago’s bad guys. Continue reading →

Regarding the decision to advance Pope Pius XII along the path to canonization, one of the world’s leading Vatican analysts put the question very simply: Why?

“Whether or not Pius was ‘silent’ on the Holocaust, the obvious question is: Why would the church want to make him a saint in the first place?” John L. Allen Jr. asked this week in the National Catholic Reporter. “There is, of course, abundant literature on the role of Pius XII during the Second World War, and plenty of reasonably neutral observers believe the evidence doesn’t support an indictment. To say that Pius XII was not ‘Hitler’s Pope,’ however, is hardly the same thing a placing a halo on his head. Lacking any clear sense of what the positive case might be for canonizing Pius XII, many people might reasonably ask that if sainthood is sure to offend a broad swath of Jewish opinion, and to create yet another black eye for the church in PR, why do it?” Continue reading →

Remember when Copenhagen was a brand of chewing tobacco? It means something different now, even as poor Kyoto, for more than a thousand years the imperial capital of Japan, has been reduced to an environmental agreement, and derivatively, the name of Stephane Dion’s dog. Continue reading →