Religious groups can relax: the federal government is not planning to remove their charitable tax status.

Not that it ever planned to do that. But now we have an official word from the office of Liberal MP Karina Gould, chair of the House of Commons Finance Committee, that it’s not going to happen.

In an email to Al Postma, the Canadian executive director of the Christian Reformed Church (a copy of which I have seen), her office stated there is no plan to remove religion as a charitable purpose from the Canadian Income Tax Act.

Charitable status for religious organizations “is not under review, and this government has no plans to change that,” her office said. “Any suggestion otherwise is false.”

The world could use more mitzvah — more good deeds.

“So many people feel powerless, thinking nothing they do makes a difference,” Sharon Graham, past president of the Winnipeg section of the National Council of Jewish Women Canada, said.

“But they are wrong. Every good deed, no matter how small, does make a difference.”

While people can do a good deed any time, she is particularly excited for Mitzvah Day this Sunday, when the Winnipeg section is doing Pack a Purse for the Fort Garry Women’s Resource Centre.

Sixty years ago, Pierre Berton’s book The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age, was published.

Commissioned by the Anglican Church of Canada, it rocked the religious establishment of the day.

In the book, Berton — then one of Canada’s best-known journalists and authors — wrote an honest and critical examination of the church’s relevance, or lack of it, in modern society.

He argued that the church in general, and the Anglican Church in particular, had become complacent and out of touch with the modern world. It had, he said, become a comfortable institution more interested in respectability than in relevance.