Oblates to celebrate life of Mother Mary Lange

More than 30 years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Mother Mary Lange fought to establish the first religious order for black women and the first black Catholic school in the .

To honor the 126th anniversary of their founder’s death, the Oblate Sisters of Providence have planned a Feb. 3 Mass of Thanksgiving at 1 p.m., which will be celebrated by Cardinal William H. Keeler in the Our Lady of Mount Providence Convent Chapel in Catonsville. The Mass will be followed by a reception, offering guests the opportunity to view Mother Mary Lange memorabilia.

A novena will also be held Jan. 25-Feb. 2 in the chapel.

Sister M. Virginie Fish, O.S.P., and several of her colleagues in the Archdiocese of Baltimore have devoted nearly 20 years to working on the cause of canonization for Mother Mary Lange, who, along with Father James Hector Joubert, S.S., founded the Oblate Sisters in 1829. With the help of two other black women, Mother Mary Lange also founded St. Frances Academy, Baltimore, in 1828, which is the first black Catholic school in the country and still in existence.

Sister Virginie said the sisters see honoring Mother Mary Lange as a fitting way to kick-start National Black History Month.

Father John Bowen, S.S., postulator for Mother Mary Lange’s cause, completed the canonization application three years ago and sent it to Rome, where it is currently under review. There is no timetable for the Vatican to complete or reject sainthood for Mother Mary Lange, Father Bowen said.

The anniversary Mass and celebration at the convent take place on the same day Mother Mary Lange died at the age of 98 on the Baltimore campus of St. Frances Academy on Chase Street in 1882.

Therese Wilson Favors, director of the Office of African American Ministries for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, said her office will host the Mother Mary Lange Awards Banquet Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. at Martin’s West in Woodlawn. The annual banquet celebrates the service and ministry of black Catholics, focusing on the areas of leadership, service through the corporal works of mercy and youths who illustrate both service and leadership within their parish and the archdiocese at large.

In light of the efforts and accomplishments of Mother Mary Lange, Ms. Favors said it is only natural that Marylanders should celebrate Mother Mary Lange’s life during National Black History Month.

“For so long, no one ever heard of Mother Lange, but now she is getting her just due,” said Sister John Francis Schilling, O.S.P., president of St. Frances Academy. “She was someone who saw the need for things before others did and took the risks to make them happen.

“Mother Lange continues to be an inspiration to me,” Sister John Francis said. “Every time I need money for the school I pray to her and she always comes through. She needs to be celebrated by the church.”

Special care collection helps priests pay for medical needs

A second collection Jan. 19-20 will give Catholics in the archdiocese the opportunity to support priests requiring special medical care in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, as well as those priests – regardless of age – who are convalescing following surgery, serious injury or illness.

“Give to them as they gave to us,” is the theme of this year’s Special Care for Diocesan Priests Collection, which helps cover priests’ expenses that aren’t covered by health insurance or Medicare, said Carol A. Purwin, of the division of clergy personnel for the Archdiocese of Baltimore. “We had a priest this year who suffered from severe circulatory issues and needed special stockings, which Medicare and insurance didn’t cover, and they were very expensive,” said Father Jay F. O’Connor, director of the division of clergy personnel. “We were able to provide them for him. Those stockings have greatly improved his quality of life.”

In a letter to the pastors in the archdiocese, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien said, “It is hoped that this campaign will serve as a reminder that those of our many brother priests who are no longer in active and visible parish settings are still in need of prayers and financial support.

Further, it is hoped that it will cause our people to reflect on the sacrifices made by these men of God and on the many ways their lives were graced by their priestly work.”

The archdiocese slightly surpassed its collection goal of $315,000 in 2007 and hopes to do the same this year, Ms. Purwin said.

The average daily cost for standard health expenses for a retired priest in the archdiocese is more than $137 and the average daily cost for a priest residing in an assisted-living facility or nursing home is more than $487, Ms. Purwin said.

The archdiocese currently has 67 retired priests who still have faculties for ministries, Father O’Connor said.

The special fund also pays 50 percent of the priests’ expenses for hearing aids, as well as vision and dental care, he said.

“We try to provide for the health care and personal needs for our priests in ways that attempt to respect their personal dignity and acknowledge the many contributions they have made for the people of the Archdiocese of Baltimore,” Father O’Connor said. “This isn’t a handout, but something that should rightly be provided for them.” MLK Day honored with blood drive and testing

In memory of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Office of African American Ministries of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the American Red Cross will sponsor a blood donation drive and a bone marrow testing Jan. 21 from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at St. Frances Academy, Baltimore.

A special prayer service in memory of Dr. King will be held 10 a.m., followed by the blood donation and bone marrow matching at the campus, which is located at 501 E. Chase St., said Therese Wilson Favors, director of the office of African American ministries.

“In both activities you will be helping to save lives or improve the quality of life for your brothers and sisters in ,” Ms. Favors said. “Your donation is needed and as you give, you will be joining a national effort this day with other offices of black Catholic ministries and the American Red Cross throughout the United States. Let’s make this a banner year for the Archdiocese of Baltimore in memory of Dr. King.”

Free lunch and gifts will be given to all who participate.

New photo resource provides peek into Vatican’s past

VATICAN – Scholars, history buffs and the public at large will now be able to peek inside some of the Vatican’s historical black-and-white photograph collection.

The written contents of the Vatican photo service’s entire Giordani Collection have been transcribed into a searchable Microsoft Word file that can be sent, free of charge, to anyone on request by e-mailing [email protected].

Thanks to the new resource, some half-million images, mostly black and white and taken between 1933 and 1975, will be available more easily to the public for research and sale. Prospective buyers also can request the photos they would like to purchase by e-mailing [email protected], specifying the photo caption and the corresponding number.

The variety of pictures is astounding. One can find the usual pictures of the meetings and travels of Popes Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, and Paul VI; of important curial officials and visiting cardinals from all over the world; and of world leaders like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Also captured are unique historical moments, like American soldiers stopping at St. Peter’s during World War II, Vatican personnel attending the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome, and Pope Paul VI meeting U.S. astronauts from Apollo 11, which landed the first men on the moon.

There are also more than 100 shots of Michelangelo’s famous “Pieta” statue being packed in a crate and hauled out by crane for shipping to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.

Sometimes the snapshots just capture daily life in Rome and the Vatican or immortalize the ordinary: There is a picture of Pope John XXIII’s shoemaker, ID snapshots of Vatican employees, and a photo of a man named “Galassi” who in 1960 was the Vatican’s oldest “sampietrino” – one of the workers responsible for the upkeep of St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Peter’s Square. But here and there are the odd and unusual, like a picture of someone’s kidney stones, photos of ceramic cats, and – perhaps because cars were still a novelty at the time – countless shots of fender benders and car accidents in and around the Vatican.

Readers can sift through the text line by line or do a word search of the 367 pages of photo captions in the electronic file.

Unfortunately, the file does not show the images. It is an exact transcription of the photographer’s archival notes which means it is written in Italian and names are sometimes misspelled. When looking for Neil Armstrong and Pope Paul, for example, typing in “Armastrong” for the U.S. astronaut will yield a find.

But, on the whole, a search for “Spellman” to look for what images the file has of the late New York Cardinal Francis J. Spellman in Rome will give the reader numerous hits.

This new electronic file, which lists the contents of the “Giordani Collection,” is a modest but significant start to the Vatican photo service’s long-term plans of updating and improving how it archives and preserves its collections.

The Giordani Collection takes its name from Francesco Giordani, the private Rome- based photographer the Vatican commissioned starting in the 1930s, long before the Vatican set up its own photography service in 1977.

The half-million glass-plate and film negatives of varying dimensions are kept the same way Giordani stored them – in thousands of cardboard boxes.

The boxes “are still piled rather tight and the boxes are very compressed so the negatives are often pressed against each other,” said Salesian Father Giuseppe Colombara, head of the Vatican’s photo service, which is part of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

He told Catholic News Service that Giordani just reused the cardboard cartons his photographic paper came in for storing his negatives.

When Giordani closed up shop in 1978, the Vatican acquired his archive and the rights to use the photos.

Giordani kept meticulous notes and caption lines for his photographs in 37 notebooks dated 1933-1975. Each entry also includes a number indicating the box in which the negative is stored.

Father Colombara said officials decided to transcribe these notes into an electronic file to facilitate the search for the many photographs researchers, writers and historians request.

After spending months transcribing Giordani’s cramped handwriting, the Salesian priest said officials decided the searchable file also should be made available to the public.

“It would be a shame to keep it hidden,” he said.

People also can do a limited search of the collection’s images on the Web site www.photo.va.

But, right now, only about 2,300 pictures from the collection have been uploaded to the site.

Scanning these old images onto the site is extremely labor-intensive, Father Colombara said, and the Vatican still does not have the money, personnel or proper equipment to scan and make public anytime soon all 500,000 images in the collection.

While digital photography has eased the way pictures are dated, captioned, organized and stored, he said this digital medium still poses enormous problems for storage.

The large megabyte size of each photo now eats up enormous amounts of digital space, putting a strain on both the photo service’s Web site and its shelves loaded with discs, he said.

With Vatican photographers snapping 1,000 to 3,000 high-definition, publication- quality pictures a day, he said, they need to start looking into “beefing up computer memory with giant hard drives.”

“It was difficult to foresee such a boom in photography – digital photography,” he said.

Back in the early days of Giordani, “the pope wasn’t photographed that much,” he said.

But today the number of papal activities has mushroomed, he said, “and every event with the pope is photographed every day.”

Today, there is so much work to be done that it looks like those days of tracking down car wrecks to document for the Vatican archives are long over.

Turkish bishops mark 2,000th anniversary year of St. Paul

WARSAW, Poland – Turkey’s Catholic bishops marked the 2,000th anniversary year of the birth of St. Paul in the southern Turkish city of Tarsus and outlined preparations for the Pauline year.

“This event is for all Christian communities, since Paul is a teacher for all the disciples of Christ. However, the anniversary is of particular importance for us living in Turkey – the apostle of the gentiles is a son of this land, and it is here he exercised most of his ministry,” said a letter from the bishops’ conference, which includes bishops of Turkey’s Armenian, Syrian, Chaldean and Latin-rite churches.

“We are immersed in a Muslim world where faith in God is still very present, both in its traditional aspects and in the assertion of new Islamic religious organizations,” said the letter, which was to be read in Catholic churches Jan. 25, the anniversary of St. Paul’s conversion. Pope Benedict XVI convoked 2008-09 as a special Pauline year of events marking the anniversary of the saint’s birth. The pope said the celebrations should have a special ecumenical character.

Bishop Luigi Padovese, apostolic administrator of Anatolia, told Catholic News Service Jan. 9 that the anniversary would begin formally June 21-22 and include a Mass in Tarsus celebrated by Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. It also will include a national pilgrimage to sites associated with St. Paul.

He added that talks on ecumenical initiatives were under way with other denominations that make up Turkey’s 120,000-member Christian minority, and he said he counted on officials in Tarsus to make facilities available for pilgrims, while also allowing regular use of the Mediterranean town’s 12th-century St. Paul Church, now a state-owned museum.

“The local authorities are aware of their town’s significance for Christians and proud one of its citizens was once a key figure. On the other hand, they aren’t prepared for an increase of religious tourism,” he said. “But government officials have agreed we should be able to worship here. After all, we’re not missionaries – we are merely answering the needs of church members.”

The bishops’ letter noted that St. Paul had completed most of his 10,000-mile missionary journeys in Turkey and would have encouraged Christians to “intensify dialogue with the Muslim world” while remaining true to their religious faith.

“This very situation, in some aspects similar to those of the first communities living in diaspora, imposes on us a clear awareness of our identity,” it added. “Before being Catholics, Orthodox, Syrians, Armenians, Chaldeans, Protestants, we are Christians. Let us not allow our differences to generate diffidence to the detriment of the unity of faith.”

In the first century, St. Paul made three journeys through what is now Turkey, preaching the Gospel and writing letters to the Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians. California mission’s switch to solar power saves energy

PALA, Calif. – If parishioners at Mission San Antonio de Pala seem to have a sunny disposition these days, perhaps it’s because for the first time since the old mission’s founding in 1816 much of its electricity is coming from solar power.

In 2007, solar panels were installed in the picnic area behind the parish’s Juan Diego Center, and the parish has spent six months “trying to work out the details of getting us connected to the grid,” said Father Luke Jauregui, pastor of the Pala mission, which is in the San Diego .

The project involved the installation of 216 solar panels, which are divided among 18 solar arrays. Each array includes 12 solar panels, measuring 26 inches by 52 inches and generating 130 watts of electricity. The panels are mounted on an aluminum frame, which is supported by a steel tube set into a concrete foundation.

The panels, which are connected to the electrical circuit that powers the center, are expected to provide a financial boon to the mission, which Father Jauregui said “struggles to keep up with all its bills.”

Without the solar panels, the parish spends about $1,000 in monthly electricity bills for the center alone, Father Jauregui said. But with the new solar panels, he expects the parish to produce about $2,000 worth of electricity each month, more than enough to keep the lights on at the Juan Diego Center.

The excess power will be returned to San Diego Gas & Electric, which will credit the parish for the unused power. Father Jauregui told The Southern Cross, San Diego’s diocesan newspaper, that the credits might be enough to cover the utility usage for the other parish buildings.

But in addition to the savings on electricity bills, the priest said, the new solar panels will also make the parish more environment-friendly.

“It makes good environmental sense,” he said of the parish’s reliance on solar power, adding, “I think it’s a responsibility of the parish and all of us to try to do our best to have less impact on the environment.”

The idea of bringing solar power to the Pala mission came from parishioners Willard and Christine Schmidt, who have been members of the parish community for about five years. The Schmidts made their own home solar-powered in 1999 and later assisted various religious communities in Mexico with similar projects.

Willard Schmidt first discussed the notion in the winter of 2006 with Father Dave Leon, who at the time was parish administrator.

Since that time, Schmidt has worked with a solar engineer on the design of the solar arrays and with his pastor on determining a suitable location for installation. He also acquired all of the necessary materials, worked on the installation himself and supervised the other workers.

“It will serve the mission well for many years to come as the cost of energy continues to rise,” Schmidt predicted of the new solar panels, which he said also will allow parishioners to be “good stewards of God’s creation.”

Pope tells Italian police to recognize God in all people

VATICAN CITY – Meeting with the Italian police who ensure his security when he is outside the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI said humanity will struggle to see itself as one family unless people believe in God and recognize all were created by him.

“Let us be clear: Without the transcendent foundation, which is God, society risks becoming simply a group of neighbors (and) ceases being a community of brothers and sisters called to form one large family,” the pope said Jan. 11.

He asked the officers to make sure that in all their dealings with the public they consciously seek “the face of a brother or a sister whom God places on your path, a friend, even if unknown, to be welcomed and assisted with patient listening.”

Seeing everyone as a creature of God, one recognizes the supreme value of that person, the pope told the officers.

“It is thanks to this awareness that the prerequisites for building a peaceful humanity can be met,” he said.

On the eve of the papal meeting, the Vatican newspaper interviewed the director of the department within the Italian police force responsible for the Vatican, Vincenzo Caso, and began by asking if he could do something to ease the inconvenience pilgrims face going through security to get into papal events or just into St. Peter’s Basilica.

“I’m sincerely sorry,” he said, “but a terrorist attack can be countered only with prevention.” The security of the pope, the Vatican and the thousands of visitors who arrive each day “is much more important than the bother caused.”

Caso’s department is responsible for the security of the pope and top Vatican officials when they are on Italian territory and for patrolling the perimeter of the Vatican and access to its public entrances.

The same 12 officers, including Caso, are at the pope’s side anytime he is in Italy outside the Vatican. The permanent assignment of the 12 “gives us a certain familiarity in fulfilling our mission and, especially, helps us construct that necessary affinity and harmony of movement which is essential,” he said.

There also are 14 officers on motorcycles who escort the papal vehicle and dozens of undercover agents who mix in with the crowds, Caso said. In addition, the squad includes 12 agents who handle the permits the thousands of foreign priests and religious need to stay legally in Italy for work or study. Caso, a career police officer, is set to retire Jan. 31 after almost three years as director of the unit.

During the meeting with the pope, Caso told him that his best memories were tied to the time he spent walking a few paces ahead of or alongside the pope in the mountains of northern Italy during Pope Benedict’s summer vacations.

“The joy of the faithful that Your Holiness casually encountered during the afternoon walks is the purest and most spontaneous witness of the love the people have for you,” Caso said. “I was particularly struck, if I may say so, by your affectionate simplicity during these meetings.”

College students track sex trafficking in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO – Students and campus ministry officials at Jesuit-run University of San Francisco are mapping sites where sex trafficking goes on in an effort to help humanitarian organizations combat what they term a blight of modern-day slavery in the city.

The students suspect that at least 90 sex emporiums operate in San Francisco with women held against their will. Because of the difficulty in gathering witness testimony and in tracking the life stories of the victims back to their home countries, the students fear traffickers often escape prosecution.

But they believe the evidence they are collecting will raise public awareness and point aid organizations to places where victims are being kept against their will.

The students described the effort at a recent session of the Theology on Tap discussion series for young adult Catholics, sponsored by the Archdiocese of San Francisco. The meeting was held at a popular bar in the city’s financial district. “A lot of the places we’re looking at are a few blocks from here,” student Mellice Hackett said.

The effort is part of the “Not For Sale” campaign against human trafficking created by David Batstone, a University of San Francisco ethics professor and an adviser to the undergraduate Community on campus. The name is taken from a book Batstone wrote on trafficking and the abolitionists fighting the problem in many countries.

Batstone decided to investigate trafficking after learning that one of his favorite Indian restaurants in the Bay Area had been trafficking women from India for kitchen work and other tasks.

The “Not for Sale” campaign is becoming a global network of abolitionists, involving faith organizations and high schools as well as colleges. More than 35 people attended the discussion group; half of them were under the age of 30 and they represented nine parishes and two colleges.

Christina Hebets, a junior, said she and Hackett began investigating sex trafficking in San Francisco in 2006. Newspaper and Internet ads for massage parlors raised the students’ suspicions that some establishments were marketing groups of women. They theorized the women were being used against their will.

The students then staked out some of the massage parlors, many of which were located on upper floors and had boarded-up windows. They noticed that few women left the buildings. They also learned the establishments did not have massage or business licenses.

After becoming frustrated with follow-up work to determine if charges could be brought against the suspected traffickers, they concluded that not enough is being done to enforce criminal laws against trafficking.

“We found out that whoever’s supposed to focus on human trafficking, it really falls through a loophole,” Hebets said.

But Lt. Mary Petrie, who is in charge of the vice crimes unit at the San Francisco Police Department, heatedly denied that her officers fail to follow up on any allegation of human trafficking. “There’s never been a third-party report that’s ever been pushed aside,” she said.

The department is part of the North Bay Trafficking Task Force, which also includes law-enforcement and social service agencies in San Mateo, Marin and Sonoma counties. The task force investigates complaints and responds with legal action or aid to the victims.

She said citizens who want to help law enforcement should know the legal definition of trafficking is “services or labor that are obtained through force, fraud or coercion.”

She added that in the same establishment a sex worker may freely earn $7,000 a month while another may be under coercion.

“That is the difficult thing to determine,” Petrie said. “If the students have probable cause or reasonable suspicion that trafficking victims are anywhere, by all means we take all allegations seriously.”

In an interview with Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocesan newspaper, Batstone stood by the students’ work.

“The task force has really been disappointing in that they have yielded very few trafficking cases,” he said, adding that it “flies in the face” of evidence gathered by students.

Luis Enrique Bazan, who is associate director of the university ministry department at the University of San Francisco and who guided the students’ investigation, also expressed frustration that law enforcement did not respond to the findings.

“They’re just not prepared to take evidence from students,” he said, adding that the students are shifting their emphasis from police work to social research.

He said human rights organizations and outraged citizens, like the students, must take on much of the responsibility for exposing the problem through education and outreach to the victims. Trafficking flourishes, he told the discussion group, because it is a low-risk, high- profit business and its victims are poor, voiceless and disposable.

SNAP members seek Cardinal Law’s removal

WASHINGTON – Members of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests are calling for Cardinal Bernard F. Law’s retirement and subsequent removal from eight Vatican congregations before the pope’s visit to the United States in April.

Barbara Blaine of Chicago, president of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, along with three other SNAP members, personally delivered a letter to the Vatican Embassy in Washington Jan. 9 stating their desire that Cardinal Law, former archbishop of Boston, officially retire. The letter was addressed to Pope Benedict XVI in care of Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the apostolic nuncio to the United States.

Cardinal Law, archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome since 2004, will turn 77 in November. A former bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Mo., he was archbishop of Boston from 1984 until he resigned in December 2002 in the wake of controversy over his handling of cases of sexual abuse committed by Boston priests.

The letter to Pope Benedict was signed by Blaine and five SNAP directors. It also included a signature of support from Mary Pat Fox, president of Voice of the Faithful, a national Catholic lay organization formed in response to the clergy abuse crisis.

The letter was accepted by an embassy secretary. A woman at the embassy told Catholic News Service Jan. 9 that embassy officials would not comment on the letter.

The letter asked the pope to “insist that Cardinal Law honor the mandatory retirement age for bishops and step down before you visit the U.S. this spring,” saying a “a more clear, simple and effective step (that) could better ease our suffering is hard to imagine.”

Canon law requires bishops to turn their resignation in to the pope when they reach 75, but the pope may or may not accept it at that time. Even when a cardinal retires in his 70s, he remains an active member of the , eligible to enter a conclave and vote for a new pope, until age 80.

“The continued high-profile status and influence of Cardinal Bernard Law, in the literal and figurative center of Catholic power, rubs even more salt into the still fresh and very deep wounds of thousands,” it continued.

The letter described Cardinal Law’s membership in eight Vatican congregations as giving him “a particularly troubling, powerful role in the selection of new bishops.”

“This, coupled with his increasing public visibility, again exacerbates intense pain among many,” the letter said.

According to the 2007 edition of the Vatican yearbook, known as the Annuario Pontificio, Cardinal Law is a member of the congregations for Eastern Churches; Divine Worship and the Sacraments; Bishops; Evangelization of Peoples; Clergy; Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life; and Catholic Education. He is also a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family.

The letter from SNAP members also mentioned a proposal in early January by a Vatican official calling for prayers to seek spiritual reparation for the damage caused by the sexual abuse of children by priests.

The letter expressed gratitude for the initiative, but also said “words alone won’t heal these deep and ongoing wounds” of abuse.

On the sidewalk in front of the Vatican Embassy, Blaine said she hoped the pope would address clergy sexual abuse in his visit to the United States, calling it a “primary issue” for U.S. Catholics. She also said she was “not convinced the Holy Father has heard the reality” of the extent and impact of clergy abuse in this country. Family shows gratitude to Mercy with donation

Jesse Lawrence was a high school freshman when his sled went over a retaining wall that was several feet high.

The impact crushed his foot, breaking numerous bones, said his mother, Sharon, and some bones were “dusted,” meaning they just weren’t there any more.

It was a particularly devastating injury for Jesse, a high school football and player at The Maret School in Washington, D.C.

The family, who lives in northern , saw several orthopedic doctors in the Washington area, but the prognosis was grim: Jesse would never run again and would always walk with a limp.

“My whole life had been revolving around sports before that – I was stunned,” said Jesse, now a senior.

The family was referred to Dr. Mark S. Myerson at The Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstruction at Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore.

While they were sitting in the waiting room, Sharon recalls, Terrell Owens, then with the Philadelphia Eagles, came out “dripping with diamonds.” Jesse commented to his dad, “We’re staying with this doctor.”

Dr. Myerson performed a complicated, aggressive surgery that involved a bone graft, plates and screws. After the foot healed, he performed another surgery to remove the plates and screws.

Jesse had missed his freshman lacrosse season but returned his sophomore year.

“It wasn’t a fabulous year, but he was glad to be out there,” said his mother, adding that he wanted to play so badly he said he would become a goalie if he couldn’t run.

But run he does – as a senior attacker he’s being recruited by several Division III schools for lacrosse, and he’s a place kicker and a cornerback on the football team. And he’s just as fast as he ever was.

“I don’t even remember I broke my foot; when I’m running I can’t tell,” Jesse said.

“He has no pain – he has no restrictions,” Sharon said. “We just feel incredibly blessed and fortunate to have found Dr. Myerson because the outcome might have been very different.”

To show their gratitude, as they talk with college coaches and wait for admission letters, the family donated $25,000 from a family foundation to The Institute for Foot and Ankle Reconstruction at Mercy. Sharon said they requested that the money be used to help Dr. Myerson train other doctors in similar procedures.

Jesse hopes to study health science in college, and perhaps pursue physical therapy, in part because of his injury.

“I really feel blessed to have Dr. Myerson in my life,” Jesse said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do if I couldn’t play sports, and I’m glad I don’t have to ask myself that question.”

Tony Melendez to play at Towson Catholic

Towson Catholic High School will host a concert by Tony Melendez and the Toe Jam Band at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 17 in the auditorium.

Mr. Melendez, who was born without arms, is a talented guitarist, singer and composer known worldwide for playing the guitar with his feet. Admission is free.

Archdiocese to participate in March for Life

Hundreds of Catholics from the Archdiocese of Baltimore will be among the more than 100,000 people expected to converge on Washington, D.C. for the 35th annual March for Life Jan. 22.

The march falls on the anniversary of two Supreme Court decisions that legalized abortion virtually on demand in the United States.

Dozens of parishes and schools throughout the archdiocese are sending buses to the event, and many Catholic schools will incorporate lessons on the sanctity of life along with prayers for a greater respect for life in conjunction with the anniversary.

The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington scheduled its annual march vigil Mass Jan. 21 for 7 p.m., with Cardinal of Philadelphia, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, as the principal celebrant and homilist. Confessions, rosaries, holy hours, the Liturgy of the Hours and litanies were to fill the overnight hours until a 7:30 a.m. Mass Jan. 22 to be celebrated by Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.

The Archdiocese of Washington was to host its annual Rally for Life and Youth Mass Jan. 22 at 8:45 a.m. at the Verizon Center, the site of pro and hockey games, followed by a 10 a.m. Mass to be celebrated by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington.

Bishop W. Francis Malooly, western vicar, and Bishop Mitchell T. Rozanski, eastern vicar, will concelebrate the Verizon Center Mass, and Bishop Rozanski will also concelebrate the vigil Mass. “It’s a wonderful time to come together,” said Linda Brenegan, respect life program director for the Archdiocese of Baltimore. “It’s peaceful, joyful and with the youth who attend, it’s energetic at the same time.”

About two-thirds of march participants are people under 30 – a big change from the event’s early years, Ms. Brenegan said.

“The increase in youth is amazing,” said Ms. Brenegan, who has participated in at least 10 marches in Washington. “I think the youth have lived through having abortion on demand. They are aware of the numbers of their peers who are not with them because of abortion.”

Dr. Ronald J. Valenti, superintendent of Catholic schools, said he, too, has noticed an increasing commitment to the pro-life cause among the young. They have a deep concern for a variety of life issues including abortion, the death penalty and care for the poor and vulnerable, he said.

“I think we sometimes underestimate our young people,” said Dr. Valenti. “They are very discerning and they are hungry for seeking the truth. We should be proud that they have made that commitment.”

Catholic schools throughout the archdiocese have been encouraged to participate in the march by sending buses, Dr. Valenti said. St. Mary’s High School in Annapolis, which is sending five busloads of students, will represent one of the largest contingents from Catholic schools in the archdiocese. Many schools will also offer educational programs about pro-ife concerns on Jan. 22, Dr. Valenti said.

“So long as we have legalized abortion, we must be the continuing voice of dissent,” he said. The superintendent noted that participation in the march helps students feel part of a larger movement.

Catholic News Service contributed to this story.