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.

Leaders of a newly-formed pro-marriage coalition came out swinging against efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in Maryland – pledging in a Nov. 30 press conference to rally citizens across the state to defeat legislation that would alter the traditional definition of marriage.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti –On a sweltering October day, a team of leaders from Catholic Relief Services stopped at St. Francois de Sales Hospital here to receive an update on plans to rebuild and transform it into a teaching hospital.

Vatican experts have declined to consider the case of the apparent healing of an Annapolis woman as the miracle needed for the canonization of Blessed Francis X. Seelos, a 19th century Redemptorist priest who was pastor of St. Alphonsus in Baltimore, St. Mary in Annapolis and Ss. Peter and Paul in Cumberland.