Friends of Sierra Leone estimates that 75,000 unarmed civilians have been killed and 20,000 mutilated during Sierra Leone’s 11-year-old civil war.

“When you’re in space, and you look back at earth, it strikes you as an overwhelmingly beautiful vision,” Jones said. “It makes me think that God constructed us to appreciate this aspect of creation. He put something in our brains to appreciate the magnificence of creation.”

A decision by a Maryland company to stop procuring and distributing body parts obtained from aborted fetuses is drawing praise from pro-life supporters who had protested the practice as abhorrent and inhumane.

While many seminaries around the country have struggled to attract students in recent years, Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg is bursting at the seams.

Not everyone gets to go bike riding with a saint. But that’s exactly what one newly ordained Franciscan priest from Baltimore did nearly 60 years ago when he visited St. Maximilian Kolbe at the Polish saint’s huge Franciscan compound outside Warsaw.

Ground was broken this summer in Baltimore County for the nation’s first elderly housing complex dedicated exclusively to the needs of deaf and hearing-impaired seniors.

As the priest sits in his solitary rectory office at St. Peter Claver in West Baltimore, a driving spring rain beats against the iron-barred windows. The storm pelts scattered debris on the streets and sidewalks of the troubled neighborhood – flushing foam cups and bits of broken concrete into the gutter along Fremont Avenue. Not so easily washed aside, however, are the young drug dealers