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WASHINGTON – The head of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities welcomed President George W. Bush’s May 3 promise to “veto any legislation that weakens current federal policies and laws on abortion.” Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia also expressed gratitude in a May 4 statement for pledges by 155 members of the House of Representatives and 34 senators to uphold any such vetoes. “These pledges help ensure that through the rest of this administration and this Congress Americans need not fear that the federal government will pursue new ways to force them to be involved in government-funded abortions, coercive population programs abroad or the destruction of embryonic human beings,” the cardinal said.

ROME – As a Peace Corps volunteer, Tom Bissell was hiking through a village in Kyrgyzstan one day, and an old Russian woman offered to take him to see the tomb of St. Matthew. “I remember thinking: ‘The tomb of Matthew? I thought he was buried in Jerusalem or Italy or somewhere like that,’“ Bissell recalled in an interview with Catholic News Service. But Kyrgyzstan, he soon learned, also had a claim on the apostle’s final resting place. The woman led Bissell to the ruins of a monastery next to Lake Issyk Kul, where according to local legend the saint’s relics were transported by Armenian monks in the fifth century. It was a small marker in the remote reaches of Central Asia.

As Father Edward M. Miller prepares the homily he will deliver at the May 10 funeral Mass for his friend of 40 years – Father John Anthony Delclos – the pastor of St. Bernardine, Baltimore, reflects on how the 67-year-old retired priest was able to take the complexity out of religion and make it easy for the faithful to comprehend. “People saw him as a real teacher of the word of God,” Father Miller said. “Someone once told him, ‘Father John, you are simple but deep.’ He didn’t quite know how to take that at first. It’s one of those compliments where you say, ‘Thank you, I think.'”

Father Kolbe School in Canton has always had a strong affiliation with neighboring St. Casimir Church, and beginning with the 2008-09 school year, the two will become even closer as St. Casimir assumes leadership of the 186-student pre-K-8 school. Although the decision represents a major financial and spiritual undertaking for the 650-family faith community, pastor Father Ross M. Syracuse, O.F.M., Conv., said the parish is embracing the opportunity.

DODGE CITY, Kan. – With his church believed to be destroyed by a powerful tornado and his parishioners “scattered to the four winds,” Father Gregory LeBlanc, pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Greensburg, spent part of May 6 visiting the displaced in local shelters. “St. Joseph Church seems to have been one of the structures devastated by Friday night’s tornado. By most accounts it was destroyed,” Father LeBlanc said in a parish bulletin posted on the Web site of the Diocese of Dodge City.

VATICAN CITY – Renewing their own spirituality and carefully studying the needs of others, women religious will be able to live the Gospel message and bring hope to the world, Pope Benedict XVI said. The pope, meeting May 7 with almost 800 superiors of women’s congregations, asked the religious to follow the biblical example of the prophets, who “first listen and contemplate and then speak, allowing themselves to be totally permeated by that love for God, which fears nothing and is stronger even than death.”

Nearly 200,000 people die each year from Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) – a condition in which a blood clot forms inside a deep vein – and surgeons at St. Joseph Medical Center, Towson, are using a procedure that basically vacuums the clot right out of the body. About 30 people were treated at St. Joseph with the new technology known as Angiojet last year and surgeons are thrilled with the results, said Dr. Mark Gonze, chief of vascular surgery at the hospital.

Every Thursday morning Doctor Charles Edwards II runs from his home in Ruxton to his office in the Maryland Spine Center at Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore. The route is about nine miles. Dr. Edwards has been running since his days of cross country and track in middle school. When he was just 10 years old he ran a 40-mile course, which was set up by his Boy Scout troop, from York, Pa., to Hunt Valley in one day. By the time he graduated from high school he had done the course seven times and even set the record at one and a half hours.