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Always eager to engage in a new sporting activity, 36-year-old Coleman Devlin quenched his thirst for adventure when he dove into wakeboarding 10 years ago. “The versatility of what you can do wakeboarding is 100 times what you can do on skiis,” said the financial advisor for Ryan Beck & Co, who attends St. Mary Star of the Sea in Federal Hill. “You can go backwards. You can go forwards. You can do a 180 air. You can jump across the lake, you can flip.” A water sport which involves a rider being towed on a single board behind a boat, wakeboarding is a combination of water skiing, snow boarding and surfing techniques. A wakeboarder typically travels an average of 20 mph and rides the wake of a speed boat.

Monsignor Richard E. Parks was a sixth grader at the old St. Paul School in East Baltimore when a Franciscan sister asked him if he ever thought about becoming a priest. As an altar boy who served daily Mass at St. Paul, the young student had been a constant presence at his parish – helping wherever he could with church and school activities. He even visited sick and shut-in parishioners for his pastor, letting them know when a priest would be stopping by to give them Holy Communion. “When that nun said that to me, the idea stuck in my mind,” remembered Monsignor Parks, pastor of Sacred Heart of Mary in Graceland Park since 1982. “I was always hanging around the rectory. I got to know good priests. They had such dedication to their parishioners.” Forty eight years after Archbishop Francis Keough ordained him to the priesthood, Monsignor Parks is preparing to retire July 1. A farewell liturgy will be celebrated at noon on July 8 at Sacred Heart of Mary, with a reception to follow.

Summer in Maryland means long drives to the Eastern Shore with the sunroof open and the windows down. Thousands of Marylanders migrate to the beach every summer for vacation, but what kind of effect do they have on the Eastern Shore parishes? According to Bishop Michael Saltarelli, who has been bishop of the Diocese of Wilmington, Del., for almost 12 years, there has been an increase of parishioners from the Archdiocese of Baltimore and surrounding states to the Eastern Shore. The increase in beachgoers means packed churches and added Masses for many of the parishes in Ocean City, Bethany Beach and Rehoboth Beach. “When they talk about the faith being lost, you can’t tell it by the Catholics that come to the Eastern Shore,” said Bishop Saltarelli. “They are a wonderful inspiration to me and our priests.” In order to accommodate all of the vacationing Catholics, parishes in the southern and northern parts of the Eastern Shore bring in more priests to help with the added weekend Masses. In fact, one parish and its mission parish have 18 Masses during the weekends in the summer, said the bishop.

NEW YORK – Playwrights Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter needn’t worry about their names being usurped in posterity’s annals by Karol Wojtyla, the archbishop of Krakow, Poland, who became Pope John Paul II. But there is much to admire in the late pope’s drama, “The Jeweler’s Shop,” currently on view in New York, courtesy of the Storm Theatre, the first in an ambitious and praiseworthy series of all his major works. The 1960 play is probably the best-known title (if any can truly be considered well-known) of the former actor’s theatrical work. There was a movie with Burt Lancaster and Olivia Hussey in 1988. On stage, in Boleslaw Taborski’s translation of the original Polish, the definition of “play” is stretched to the limit. The playwright himself slyly subtitled it “A Meditation on the Sacrament of Matrimony, Passing on Occasion Into a Drama” when it was first published, as if to acknowledge the lack of dramatic incident. Still, it’s a fascinating piece.

PASADENA, Calif. – Southern California’s largest rosary recitation in more than 50 years offered a broad cross-section of ages and ethnicities in the local Catholic Church, and a link to a storied tradition. Some 50,000 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena May 19 prayed the rosary during the Rosary Bowl, an event sponsored by Holy Cross Family Ministries and its Family Theater Productions in conjunction with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. With the theme “A World at Prayer is a World at Peace,” the event continued the work of the late Holy Cross Father Patrick Peyton, the founder of Holy Cross Family Ministries. Before his death in 1992, Father Peyton conducted more than 40 events throughout the world reaching more than 28 million people. Taryn Wilson, a member of Sacred Heart Parish in Lancaster, attended the Rosary Bowl with her son, Trenton, 16, and her mother, LaVelle. She said she was attracted by the idea of praying the rosary as a family.