“I was always very mission-minded,” said Mrs. Chesnavage, a former president of her parish’s sodality who has taken courses in auto mechanics and cooking. “I felt like God needed me. He gave me 12 healthy children, so I felt like I have to give something back.”

A day after Gov. Martin J. O’Malley released his Jan. 20 budget in Annapolis, leaders of the Maryland Catholic Conference expressed grave concerns about how it could hurt the poor, children in nonpublic schools and the unborn.

Eric Greene knows three classmates from his Catholic elementary school who have died. Others he knows from his old neighborhood are strung out on drugs or in jail.

Parishioners of St. Leo in Little Italy were informed Dec. 28 that Michael Salerno, formerly their Pallottine pastor, admitted to the sexual abuse of a minor in the 1970s and that his faculties to function as a priest have been permanently revoked.

“Malik is the child of my heart,” Ms. Brogden, 44, said. “He may not be the child of my womb, but he’s the child of my heart. And he knows it.”

When 12-year-old Thomas Foley opened a shoebox in his Aunt Mame’s closet more than 65 years ago, he unwittingly uncovered the building blocks for a remarkable story of faith, courage and determination.

It looks more than a little bit like a Picasso, the nun’s painting of St. Ambrose baptizing St. Augustine.

As Melissa Brent crept closer to the 7-foot, 850-pound bronze statue, not even a steady late-November rain could dampen her joy.

Father Robert “Rocky” Kearns, a pioneering Josephite priest, pastor and superior general who was active in the social justice movement, died in an Alabama hospital Dec. 6 from complications of cancer. He was 72.

From a parish school in South Philadelphia to the Catoctin Mountains, Phelan spent 65 years on campuses affiliated with the church.