Home Page

Holy Orders: A Sacrament at the Service of Communion The memory of Saturday, June 26, 2004 will be with me forever as a special day. It was the day of my priestly ordination at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. I remember promising respect and obedience to Cardinal Keeler and his successors as Archbishop of Baltimore. I remember my hands being anointed with sacred oil. I remember being vested in the chasuble and stole by my brother Jon. I remember the priests of Baltimore sharing in the celebration that day. And I remember concelebrating the Eucharist for the first time.

WARSAW, Poland — Russia’s Catholic bishops have urged the newly elected president, Dmitri Medvedev, to strengthen ties with religious communities and help remove bureaucratic obstacles to the work of foreign clergy in the country.

JERUSALEM — A Palestinian gunman’s attack on a Jewish seminary was a “monstrous” atrocity, said a former director of Jerusalem’s Franciscan seminary. Father Artemio Vitores, vicar of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, told Catholic News Service he has lived through five wars and two Palestinian uprisings in the Holy Land, but the attack on the seminary, or yeshiva, affected him on a more personal level.

More than 750 men, women and students packed a ballroom in Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel March 4 to applaud the efforts of the honorees at Catholic Charities’ annual distinguished service awards banquet.

ANNAPOLIS – Standing on the marble floors of the State House just outside the House of Delegates chamber, 12-year-old Cameron Wood was still beaming after his first successful effort as a lobbyist. The seventh-grader from Our Lady of Victory School in Arbutus was one of 400 nonpublic school students who converged on Annapolis March 6 to ask their lawmakers to support nonpublic school students and teachers.

Grinning impishly, 15-year-old Frances Grace Borowsky looked at her parents and declared: “I think they’ve done a good job so far.”