Cumberland-area parishes currently have two funerals for every baptism. One third of registered parishioners are age 60 or older. The city’s population has declined from 30,000 in 1979 to 20,859 today, while the number of priests serving the five parishes has plummeted from 13 to four – the result of a clergy shortage.

With spring here, Kay Bowman’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of love – not the romantic kind the poet Tennyson had in mind, but love for the children of her parish, St. Philip Neri in Linthicum Heights, and its school.

“It seems like our society and media want to push pro-lifers to the side and hope that we would shut our mouths and go away quietly,” said Birk, whose 6’4’’, 310-pound frame struck a distinct figure among the hundreds of marchers who filed through downtown streets. “Let’s not do that.”

GLEN BURNIE – After a week of classroom stress and social angst, many high schoolers use Friday nights to blow off steam at parties.

After her brother became Baltimore’s 21st murder victim of 2007, Erricka Bridgeford couldn’t wait for the police to find the person who did it. Bridgeford dreamed of spitting in the murderer’s face. Male relatives thought of even more violent ways of exacting vengeance, she said.

Loyola Blakefield freshman Joseph T. Gorman died March 9 after two years of battling leukemia.

Growing up in New York, Redemptorist Father John Murray loved marching with his father in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Now that he uses a wheelchair, Father Murray is about to promote the Saint of Ireland in a way that may prove more powerful than anything he could have done on foot in a parade.

Two members of a family whose son was killed in Iraq had different reactions to a March 2 Supreme Court decision upholding the First Amendment rights of members of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest outside the 2006 funeral of Matthew Snyder at St. John Parish in Westminster.

“You have been and continue to be a star,” Archbishop Sambi said, “a light of hope, not only for the church, but also for the community at large.”

Monsignor Martin R. Strempeck, a much-loved priest and former pastor who devoted much of his ministry to comforting others, died Feb. 8. Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien offered a funeral Mass Feb. 14 at St. Margaret in Bel, the parish where 82-year-old MonsignorStrempeck had retired but remained active in ministry until three months before his death.