Two graduates of the University of Maryland College Park took a step closer to becoming Dominican priests after professing their solemn vows late in the summer of 2011 at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.

Paulist Father James McCabe, former director of the Family Life Center in Baltimore and a longtime columnist for The Catholic Review, died Dec. 25, 2011 in Toronto. He was 81 and had been battling cancer.

Tyshell King has no idea what her life would be like without basketball, which she began playing in middle school.

FOURTH IN A SERIES PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Carolyn Woo learned English from Maryknoll missioner sisters. In tears her first day at Purdue University because she couldn’t decipher a campus map, she found solace at its Newman Center. Woo met and married her husband at Purdue, and its church bell rang when she defended her doctoral dissertation there.

As Brian Morrison walked around the Children’s House at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, a woman emerged from a room. She overheard Morrison talking about the services his organization, the Believe In Tomorrow Children’s Foundation, provides for the house.

Thinking globally isn’t just a catchphrase at Mercy High School. It’s a way of life. That has never been truer, as the school has started a Center for Global Education.

EDGEMERE – Standing at the back of St. Luke Church following a Dec. 11 Mass marking his retirement, Monsignor Joseph S. Lizor Jr. extended both arms to shake hands with the many parishioners who wanted to greet him. Several children gave the 79-year-old pastor homemade cards, while hugs seemed to engulf the vested clergyman faster than he expected.

St. John’s Catholic Prep in Frederick has announced it will be moving to the campus of St. Thomas More Academy in Buckeystown. St. Thomas More will move to a yet to be determined site in Frederick County.

Ever the poetic soul, Xaverian Brother James M. Kelly died as the sun was rising Dec. 3, the feast day of his congregation’s patron, St. Francis Xavier.

A Raphael masterpiece that hangs in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is getting national attention this holiday season as the U.S. Postal Service features the “Madonna of the Candelabra” as one of its 2011 Christmas stamps.