Michael W. Higgins

With his latest book, Mark Bourrie ushers readers into a world replete with exotic rituals, social and cultural habits long extinct (or, more precisely, obliterated by sovereign European powers), and not a few mutual slaughters. Gripping stuff, grippingly told. The book’s grand sweep takes us from the arrival of Jean de Brébeuf in Canada in 1625 up to the 1984 visit of Pope John Paul…

The fiction of David Adams Richards is unmistakable. It has salient features that distinguish his novels and short stories in the same way that a single paragraph can instantly signal a Mordecai Richler. For some critics and readers, this consistency illustrates a deficit of imagination. For others, the predictable recurrence of a signature prose with its stylistic peculiarities and recognizable plot patterns provides an opportunity to explore at greater length the layered intricacies of a flawed and heroic…

Penned in 1959 and published in 1967, “The Vanishing Clergyman” was Ivan Illich’s bravura entry into the contentious world of ecclesiastical polemics and combative theologies following the Second Vatican Council. It is a measure of his prophetic instincts that the essay, although released after the council ended in 1965, was conceived several years before that assembly began in…

The timing was not propitious; in fact, it was catastrophic. Releasing a book on Jean Vanier just before demoralizing revelations came out — that the man many took to be a living saint was in fact far from it — does not make for good marketing. But that is neither the author’s nor the publisher’s…

I didn’t like high school very much; in fact, I loathed it. Mine wasn’t a rough or mismanaged school. It ranked highly in Toronto, and many decades after graduating I was honoured with being included on its inaugural Wall of Fame. But the memory of unhappiness has never quite been expunged. My grade school was a Catholic one nestled in the heart of the township of York and I loved…

Quebec missionary and cleric Claude Lacaille shoots from the hip: “Wojtyla and Ratzinger had left us naked and exposed to the savage repression of our tyrants and had delivered the shepherdless sheep to the wolves. The Church’s history will record that these men were a formidable obstacle to the evangelization of the continent.” This stark and severe judgement of the two pontificates that preceded the current papacy of Francis—that of John Paul II and Benedict XVI respectively—is without…

The recent election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the successor of Pope Benedict XVI was surprising on several counts. The new pope took the name of Francis, comes from what the Vatican still thinks of as the New World and is a member of the Companions of Jesus or the Jesuits. All papal firsts. He has communicated by…