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As seems to be happening too often these days, Baltimore has lost another friend. Judge Roger Brown’s unexpected exit from this world on March 23, 2009, has left a gaping hole in not only Maryland’s legal community, but also in our region’s black Catholic community.

The Easter season provides the media with the opportunity each year to report on the state of the Catholic Church, Christianity and basically all-things-religion. This Easter was no different. The Easter-week edition of Newsweek contained an article entitled, “The End of Christian America,” based largely on the recently released 2009 American Religious Identification Survey which revealed that the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation doubled over the past 20 years from 8 to 15 percent. Though the Church remains the largest U.S. denomination, the survey’s authors concluded that “these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more ‘evangelical’ outlook among Christians.”

NEW YORK – Archbishop Timothy J. Dolan predicted his style as New York’s archbishop will differ from that of his predecessors, but the substance will be the same.

They didn’t get their much-sought business tax credit to help students and teachers in nonpublic and public schools, but leaders of the Maryland Catholic Conference (MCC) were elated to win an additional $2 million in state funding for nonreligious textbooks and technology in nonpublic schools.

WASHINGTON – Calling the protests against President Barack Obama’s planned commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame “unseemly and unhelpful,” Bishop John M. D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., advised Catholics not to attend such demonstrations.

ASUNCION, Paraguay – Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, the former bishop who was elected in 2008, admitted April 13 that he had fathered a child, now nearly two years old, who was born before Lugo was laicized.