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All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.
	Friday, January 18, 2008 - Vol. 7, No. 19

I was in Saint Augustine, Fla., this week, speaking at a national “Cathedral Ministry Conference.” For American Catholics, Saint Augustine is, in a sense, where it all began; it was here on Sept. 8, 1565, that a Spanish missionary priest celebrated the first Mass in what would eventually become the United States.

A rustic altar in a small park billed as “America’s most sacred acre,” located across a footbridge from Prince of Peace Catholic Church, marks the site where Fr. Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales said that Mass some 442 years ago. Today an 11-foot bronze statue of Lopez looks out over the harbor, arms outstretched.

From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB	January 18, 2008
	Vol. 5, No. 19

One of the more interesting dimensions of the current presidential campaign is that we may all need to wrestle now with the question of which is more prevalent in US society -- racism or sexism. This is an alternative that strikes me as a very strange question to begin with, frankly. After all, all races have a male-female question since all men of all races have been raised in the historical mythology of male superiority. All males, any males, everywhere. Which means then that discrimination is also true for all women, any women, anywhere.

Spanish layman Joaquin Navarro-Valls is no longer the Vatican spokesperson, but he remains a prominent voice in the broader Catholic conversation. In yesterday’s edition of the Italian daily la Repubblica, Navarro-Valls commented on the protests which resulted in the cancellation of Pope Benedict XVI’s scheduled visit to La Sapienza University in Rome.

BY JOAQUIN NAVARRO-VALLS