SAN DIEGO – Their soccer team may be called the Martyrs, but that doesn’t mean seminarian Jacob Bertrand and his teammates will just let their opponents beat them. “We do recognize the irony,” Bertrand said in an interview by e-mail with The Southern Cross, newspaper of the San Diego Diocese. The Martyrs took their name...Read More

The biggest game of the year now has competition in the minds of Calvert Hall football players and coaches.Read More

VATICAN CITY – Celebrating Palm Sunday Mass at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI asked young people not to let the question of God drift out of their lives. The pope opened Holy Week with a procession and liturgy in St. Peter’s Square April 1, blessing palms and olive branches in memory of Christ’s triumphal entry...Read More

WASHINGTON – Bil Keane, the Catholic cartoonist who originated the comic strip “The Family Circus” more than 50 years ago, died Nov. 8 at age 89 in Paradise Valley, Ariz., near Phoenix. The cause of death was given as congestive heart failure.Read More

Attendees sometimes find themselves standing in the hallway outside Sister Carol Cimino’s, S.S.J., meeting room as she delivers engaging sessions to packed audiences during the annual National Catholic Educational Association convention. The Clifton Park, N.Y., educational consultant “always draws a huge crowd,” said Brian Gray, editor of NCEA’s Momentum Magazine and part of the communication...Read More

VATICAN CITY – New biotechnologies raise questions in the fields of medicine, economics, ethics and philosophy, and the Vatican plans to look at all of them during a three-day conference devoted to adult stem-cell research, officials said.Read More

ROME – In connection with the sainthood cause of Pope John Paul II, a graphologist and a psychiatrist were called as expert witnesses in the investigation into the presumed healing of a nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Monsignor Slawomir Oder, the postulator of Pope John Paul’s cause, said the French diocese where the nun lives...Read More

WASHINGTON – With the Senate preparing to take up the appropriations bill for foreign aid, Baltimore Auxiliary Bishop Denis J. Madden called to mind some of his more vivid encounters with recipients of such assistance and how it affected their lives.Read More