As the small jet carrying 10-year-old Xavia Pirozzi’s new heart approached Philadelphia International Airport the evening of Jan. 5, there was a 20 percent chance the aircraft would not be able to land in the dense fog. Inside the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Xavia’s parents, Nicolle Borys-Pirozzi and Ralph Pirozzi, waited anxiously, knowing the fog was just one of many challenges their daughter has weathered in her short lifetime.

Before they stepped into noisy M&T Bank Stadium for the AFC Divisional playoff game Jan. 15, some members of the Baltimore Ravens quietly gathered for morning prayer at their downtown hotel.

WASHINGTON – The priestly ministry of Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, named a cardinal Jan. 6 by Pope Benedict XVI, has been marked by frequent assignments, so that he rarely stays in one place very long. And even when he is ensconced somewhere for a while, he gets to moving.

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.