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Women in frilly bridesmaids’ dresses, a wedding cake and a traditional bouquet toss are just some of the trappings of a wedding – minus a bride or groom – that will mark the fourth-annual Bridesmaid’s BINGO, a May 23 wedding-themed fundraiser for Catholic Charities’ My Sister’s Place.

The article “New, Natural Breast Reconstruction Following Mastectomy” (Editor’s note: The article to which the author is referring is an advertisement on page nine of the CR, April 26) reporting on the shift from using muscle tissue to using fat tissue and the benefits of the switch, was closely followed by an Internet report that surgeons in Japan and Europe are using fat tissue and autologous stem cells.

After playing in their final league game of the season, five Mount de Sales Academy, Catonsville, senior lacrosse players were honored at the Sailors’ first senior signing, April 30 in The Regina Keenan Knott Alumnae Hall on the campus of Mount de Sales. Family, friends, administrators and coaches gathered that evening to recognize the bright future of these players but also took a look back at the players’ accomplishments over the last four years.

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.”