With nervous quick reads and high voices behind a podium almost taller than most of them, students from four Catholic schools read aloud their winning essays Dec. 4 in the “How a Woman I Love Takes Great Care of Me” student essay celebration sponsored by Good Samaritan Hospital, Baltimore.Read More

Frederick V. Roussey heads a cemetery crew like the city cop he once was. The day begins with morning roll call in the house at a corner of New Cathedral Cemetery, where he is superintendent. There, he dispatches his crew in new fire-engine-red trucks to the 125-acre cemetery in West Baltimore.Read More

VATICAN CITY – Parents may allow their children to be inoculated with vaccines that were produced with cells of illicit origin, said a top Vatican official.Read More

VATICAN CITY – No fully moral solution exists for dealing with frozen embryos, not even the idea of adopting or “rescuing” abandoned embryos to bring them to full development and birth, Vatican officials said.Read More

ROME – Every Friday afternoon in Jerusalem’s Old City, thousands of Muslims walk to Al Aqsa Mosque to pray, thousands of Jews walk to the Western Wall to pray and thousands of Christians carry a cross in procession along the Via Dolorosa, recalling the Way of the Cross.Read More

WASHINGTON – Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Jesuit theologian who was made a cardinal in 2001, died Dec. 12 at the Jesuit infirmary in New York, Murray-Weigel Hall. A cause of death was not released but he had been in poor health. He was 90 years old.Read More

VATICAN CITY – For Pope Benedict XVI, 2008 was the year of St. Paul, the year of the Bible and the year of the United States.Read More

WASHINGTON – Two priests were among more than a half-dozen Catholics in a group of 24 people awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal Dec. 10 by President George W. Bush.Read More