PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – During the past 40 years – from his first engagement as a Peace Corps volunteer to his three decades spanning the globe with Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services – Ken Hackett has witnessed and responded to human misery.

At mid-day Feb. 4, while most in the Mid-Atlantic concerned themselves with the arrival of a record-setting blizzard, Deacon Rodrigue Mortel sat in his office at the Catholic Center and considered a crisis that requires more than stocking up on bread and milk.

Lineetra Seward dreams of a day when she can walk around her Baltimore City neighborhood without fear.

City pastors who worked with Mayor Sheila Dixon on issues ranging from homelessness to immigration gave the outgoing mayor generally high marks for her performance in office. Yet, as the 56-year-old mayor prepares to step down Feb. 4 as part of a plea deal in a corruption case, priests throughout the city expressed disappointment in her behavior.

Bishop John H. Ricard, SSJ, bishop of Penacola-Tallahassee, Fla., and former auxiliary bishop of Baltimore, was admitted to the hospital recently with a stroke. The following information was provided by the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee:

As pallbearers slowly guided Monsignor F. Dennis Tinder’s casket out of Immaculate Conception Church in Towson following his Dec. 12 funeral Mass, approximately 120 priests and deacons united their voices in a final tribute to their brother clergyman. A solemn church bell tolled every few seconds while the white-robed men chanted “Salve Regina” in Latin […]

Monsignor F. Dennis Tinder died Dec. 4, days after his retirement as pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Towson.

Jim Burke walked through a foot of snow down York Road to be at the first Mass celebrated at St. Pius X, Rodgers Forge, in 1958.

Christopher J. Coffland, a Baltimore native, was killed by a roadside bomb Nov. 13 in the Wardak province of Afghanistan. The Army reservist, who had joined the military a month before he reached the enlistment age limit of 42, had been in Afghanistan for two weeks working as an intelligence specialist.

When Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien referred to the rector of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen as “the indomitable, irrepressible Monsignor Robert Armstrong,” hundreds of parishioners interrupted the archbishop’s Nov. 15 cathedral homily with applause.