EDMONTON – The city's 96th Street is notorious for its churches. In fact, it's called Church Street because, from Jasper Avenue north to 111th Avenue, it features a remarkable collection of 13 churches built between the start of the 20th century and the early 1970s.

Christianity is the central, most common and most thoroughly marginalized, obscured and misrepresented belief system in the opening years of the 21st century, says author and journalist Michael Coren.

At the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy, after the priest has consecrated the bread and the chalice of wine, he genuflects in adoration and then proclaims "The mystery of faith" to which the people respond with a profession of faith. One popular acclamation is: "We proclaim your death, O Lord, and profess your resurrection until you come again."

TORONTO – Africans still want the kind of genuine partnership with Canadians the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace has fostered over the last four decades, said the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Eastern Africa.

The feast of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13, is the occasion every year for millions of devotees to celebrate the apparition of Mary to three Portuguese peasant children in 1917 and to meditate on her call for repentance and conversion by the modern world.

The home is our most basic experience of Church, says theologian Richard Gaillardetz. It is, for Blessed John Paul II, "a school of following Christ."

RED DEER – The local executive of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul has approved the purchase of a 2005 GMC cube van for the society.

VATICAN CITY – The world's oldest Catholic bishop, Vietnamese Bishop Antoine Nguyen Van Thien, died May 13 in France two months after his 106th birthday.

Canada's Catholic bishops have made an important contribution to Catholic self-understanding and to public debate with their Pastoral Letter on Freedom of Conscience and Religion, issued May 14.

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor. The congregation initially responded with enthusiasm and a number of programs were introduced that invited people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street people, to come their church.