After many years of work with Catholic Relief Services, Lent, and its seasonal period of reflection, prayer, fasting and almsgiving, grows more meaningful to me year after year. It's not just because of the stories I hear about the help that CRS provides to those who are suffering. It is the fact that with each...Read More

Enacting a ban on human cloning in Maryland will be a central focus of the 28th annual Maryland Candlelight March for Life, March 12 in Annapolis. Prolife supporters from across the state will rally at the state capital, asking lawmakers to support the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2007 – a Senate bill that prohibits...Read More

The president of Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, Baltimore, Father John Swope, S.J., announced the appointment of three key staff positions for the new school slated to open fall 2007.Read More

LAHORE, Pakistan – Posters pasted on billboards and trees by the country’s main Muslim political alliance blare the “Quran-prescribed” punishments of 100 lashes or death by stoning for women who have sex outside of marriage. As a new bill liberalizing strict women’s laws makes its way through Parliament, hard-line groups have been fighting to keep...Read More

Baltimore Christian leaders used the backdrop of Ash Wednesday and props of dead soldier’s combat boots as they called President Bush’s Iraq War policies immoral and urged Maryland’s faithful to take part in an organized anti-war rally in Washington. The 13 religious leaders from varying Christian faiths – which included Auxiliary Bishop Denis J. Madden...Read More

When pastoral leaders from the westernmost corner of Maryland participate in archdiocesan meetings, it often means a 165-mile trek to Baltimore. Monsignor Thomas Bevan, pastor of St. Patrick in Cumberland, hopes the travel burden will be lightened now that his parish has opened a new media/teleconference center that will soon make it possible to see...Read More

VATICAN CITY – Although the Global Positioning System has made meridians obsolete in mapmaking, a group of geographers used the GPS to mark the exact spot where the old prime meridian of Italy passed through the Vatican. Standing at the end of a technologically guaranteed straight line of flower pots, the geographers and Vatican officials...Read More

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI will canonize a Brazilian Franciscan during his May trip to Brazil and will declare four other new saints in June. During a prayer service in the Apostolic Palace Feb. 23, the pope set May 11 as the date for the canonization of Blessed Antonio Galvao, an 18th-century Franciscan and...Read More