We have come to a new chapter in the COVID-19 crisis and conflict that has gripped our Church, this nation and the world.

Four Lessons from the 20th century.

Seventy-five years ago last February, Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friend Christian Probst were executed by guillotine at Munich's Stadelheim Prison for high treason.

The practice of medicine is an inescapably moral enterprise precisely because physicians are always seeking to do some kind of good and avoid some kind of evil for their patients.

The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons is consulting on whether patients' right of access to certain procedures, such as abortion, should trump the rights of those physicians who refuse, for reasons of conscience, to provide them.

An Ontario College of Physicians official, Dr Marc Gabel, says that physicians unwilling to provide or facilitate abortion for reasons of conscience should not be family physicians.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission made a serious error in 2008 when it attempted to suppress freedom of conscience and religion in the medical profession on the grounds that physicians are "providers of secular public services."

A crusade was recently started in Ontario against a physician and two colleagues by crusaders who are arguing that in a 'secular' state health care system, physicians should be forbidden to act on their moral or religious beliefs.

A Catholic physician once related to me a powerful story about one of his patients, who had just received a diagnosis of advanced, metastatic cancer and had a relatively short time left to live.

It is a secularist truism: Religion and religious voices and views have no valid role to play in the public square. Indeed, many secularists are openly hostile to any such participation. But are they correct?