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As nearly 1,000 young Catholics take to the streets of Baltimore March 31 to celebrate the coming of Easter – a time of new life and new beginnings – the 14th annual Archdiocesan Youth and Young Adult Pilgrimage will be undergoing a conversion of its own. For the first time in two years, the youth and young adult participants will visit the recently restored Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Baltimore. The 2.8-mile route itself is also different, now beginning with a rally in Canton at 11:30 a.m. at O’Donnell Street Park, next to St. Casimir. After eucharistic adoration at St. Casimir, the procession will kick off at 1:30 p.m. with pilgrims carrying a 10-foot wooden cross through the streets.

Sen. James DeGrange of Anne Arundel County is trying again. For the second year in a row, the parishioner of Holy Trinity in Glen Burnie and Democratic state senator has introduced a bill that would provide significant business tax credits to corporations and small businesses that support tuition scholarship programs and other K-12 education initiatives. Known as BOAST, “Building Opportunities for All Students and Teachers in Maryland,” the proposed program is modeled on Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit. It would allow corporations and small businesses to claim a 75 percent state tax credit for donations to organizations that support Maryland’s K-12 public and nonpublic school students and teachers.

By more than a 2-1 margin, Maryland voters support replacing the state’s death penalty with a life without parole prison sentence, according to the results of a poll commissioned by the Maryland Catholic Conference and released Feb. 28. While 56 percent of those surveyed said they support the death penalty, 61 percent said they believed life without parole was an acceptable substitute for capital punishment. Only 27 percent said it was not. The poll also found that legislators who vote for repeal would not likely face repercussions at election time. Nearly 30 percent of voters said they would be more likely to support such a legislator and 42 percent said it would not impact their vote.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – The Syracuse Diocese made headlines when it denied former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe an opportunity to speak at his alma mater, Bishop Ludden Junior/Senior High School. Mr. McAuliffe was initially scheduled to speak to about 100 fellow alumni at Ludden Feb. 24, and hold a signing for his new book, “What a Party! My Life Among Democrats, Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators, and Other Wild Animals.” His appearance at the school was originally approved in January, but several days before the event the diocese withdrew permission for him to speak there.

SYDNEY, Australia – Australia has taken charge of the World Youth Day cross and Marian icon, symbols of the world’s largest youth event which have traveled tens of thousands of miles around the world. The cross and icon left Madagascar in February for Korea, where Australia’s stewardship began and will continue until the end of World Youth Day Sydney in July 2008.

VATICAN CITY – Two months after Pope Benedict XVI’s first choice as archbishop of Warsaw, Poland, resigned amid accusations of collaborating with communists, the pope named a 57-year-old bishop to take the post. Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz, who had been bishop of Koszalin-Kolobrzeg, was named archbishop of Warsaw March 3. Newspapers have published quotations from the file that communist Poland’s secret police kept on the cleric, saying that he repeatedly had refused to cooperate. A Polish priest’s new book describes how the secret police attempted over the course of 12 years to recruit Archbishop Nycz as an informer but gave up in the face of his refusals.

Testifying in favor of a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, Richard J. Dowling told members of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee it is proper to codify a historical definition of marriage that has withstood the test of time.

WASHINGTON – A Jesuit priest is to be reinstated as a chaplain at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center after a federal board ruled that he was fired because of religious discrimination. Father Henry Heffernan, 76, was ordered to be reinstated at the NIH clinic in Bethesda, Md., by the Merit Systems Protection Board, a federal agency that hears personnel disputes. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in January that Father Heffernan was wrongly suspended and fired in 2004. The merit systems board, a quasi-judicial entity, upheld the decision in a Feb. 23 order.