ANNAPOLIS – Armed with a new study that shows the death penalty has cost taxpayers at least $186 million, opponents of capital punishment urged a Senate committee to ban the death penalty in Maryland or at least commission a study to look at the issue.Read More
VATICAN CITY – Four centuries after he was called by church officials to retract teachings deemed suspect of heresy, the 17th-century Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei will be returning to Vatican City.Read More
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The first officially sanctioned Washington souvenir for Pope Benedict XVI's upcoming visit to the United States is a tiny T-shirt for a teddy bear.Read More
ROME (CNS) -- Logistical details are being finalized in an attempt to fly the body of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati to Sydney, Australia, for veneration by young people at World Youth Day in July.Read More
Holy Orders: A Sacrament at the Service of Communion The memory of Saturday, June 26, 2004 will be with me forever as a special day. It was the day of my priestly ordination at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. I remember promising respect and obedience to Cardinal Keeler and his successors as Archbishop of...Read More
When mothers and daughters gathered together for a fashion show at St. John’s Portico, they were just as concerned with inner beauty as outer beauty.Read More
DETROIT -- Just as St. Patrick evangelized Ireland in the fifth century, an Irish priest studying in Detroit says the Irish of the 21st century now need the new evangelization called for by the late Pope John Paul II.Read More
WARSAW, Poland -- Russia's Catholic bishops have urged the newly elected president, Dmitri Medvedev, to strengthen ties with religious communities and help remove bureaucratic obstacles to the work of foreign clergy in the country.Read More
ROME -- The Sri Lankan navy has confiscated permanent housing that a Jesuit aid agency had built for refugees affected by the country's civil war.Read More
JERUSALEM -- A Palestinian gunman's attack on a Jewish seminary was a "monstrous" atrocity, said a former director of Jerusalem's Franciscan seminary. Father Artemio Vitores, vicar of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, told Catholic News Service he has lived through five wars and two Palestinian uprisings in the Holy Land, but the attack...Read More