“When you’re in space, and you look back at earth, it strikes you as an overwhelmingly beautiful vision,” Jones said. “It makes me think that God constructed us to appreciate this aspect of creation. He put something in our brains to appreciate the magnificence of creation.”

A decision by a Maryland company to stop procuring and distributing body parts obtained from aborted fetuses is drawing praise from pro-life supporters who had protested the practice as abhorrent and inhumane.

While many seminaries around the country have struggled to attract students in recent years, Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg is bursting at the seams.

Not everyone gets to go bike riding with a saint. But that’s exactly what one newly ordained Franciscan priest from Baltimore did nearly 60 years ago when he visited St. Maximilian Kolbe at the Polish saint’s huge Franciscan compound outside Warsaw.

Ground was broken this summer in Baltimore County for the nation’s first elderly housing complex dedicated exclusively to the needs of deaf and hearing-impaired seniors.