About 50 parishioners gathered at St. Margaret, Bel Air, for the parish’s first-ever Mass of Healing and Hope on Sept. 19, which supported those who struggle with addiction.
About 50 parishioners gathered at St. Margaret, Bel Air, for the parish’s first-ever Mass of Healing and Hope on Sept. 19, which supported those who struggle with addiction.

An archdiocesan program designed to meet the educational needs of Catholic school students with documented learning disabilities has expanded to a third location. PRIDE (Pupils Receiving Inclusive Diversified Education), which has been offered at Mother Mary Lange School in Baltimore and Sacred Heart of Mary School in Graceland Park for several years, began operating at St. Jane Frances de Chantal School in Pasadena with the start of the current school year.
When amateur actor and former Benedictine priest Benet Hanlon began working in a Fells Point theater in the late 1970s, he noticed a number of homeless men along the then-scrappy waterfront streets, got to know several of them and eventually rented a small row house on Aliceanna Street in 1977 in an effort to feed them.

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI declined to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during his August vacation, but Vatican officials said it should not be interpreted as a diplomatic snub. “The only reason she wasn’t received was that she came during a period when the pope doesn’t receive anyone. It was a purely technical question of protocol,” an informed Vatican source told Catholic News Service Sept. 20. The source said it was “absolutely not” the Vatican’s intention to rebuff Ms. Rice or signal disagreement with U.S. policy on the Middle East.
LOS ANGELES – The Archdiocese of Los Angeles officially launched an initiative to renew the local church with the release of a new pastoral letter on stewardship Sept. 8.

CHICAGO – Violence can happen anywhere. But when Israel Morales, a neighborhood organizer and parishioner at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish on Chicago’s Southwest Side, was gunned down this summer near the church, community members decided they had to do something. The first thing they did was have a Mass outside, near where Morales was killed. Since then, the parish has had three more street Masses, with another set for Sept. 27, all on blocks where violence has occurred. The first Masses drew 120 to 150 people; one in late August had more than 200 in the congregation.
A funeral Mass for Sister Mary Camillus Smith, R.S.M, was offered Sept. 15 at The Villa in Baltimore. Sister Mary Camillus died Sept. 12. She was 88.
Stay in touch with your friends, not just because you like them but because having them correlates with better health.
Aspiring teachers from Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg are getting first-hand experience teaching in the Catholic school system thanks to a new partnership between their college and St. John Regional Catholic School in Frederick.
WASHINGTON – Catholic health care and ethical groups thanked the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for clarifying its stand on artificial nutrition and hydration for patients in a persistent vegetative state in a pair of Sept. 14 documents.
WASHINGTON – Relevant Radio, which calls itself the United States’ largest Catholic radio network, is negotiating with the Federal Communications Commission to erase a proposed $4.7 million penalty levied after the network withdrew its bid in an Arizona radio spectrum auction.
VATICAN CITY – Young children must be guided from a very early age with moral law so that they will have direction as they weather life’s storms and resist its temptations, Pope Benedict XVI said.
