In case you were expecting to see Spanish Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera as one of the ordaining bishops at the episcopal ordination of Archbishop-designate J. Augustine DiNoia tomorrow in Washington, think again.

The cardinal, who is the prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, experienced “visa difficulties” and could not board the plane in Rome, according to Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Washington.

Retired Archbishop Thomas C. Kelly of Louisville, Ky., will step in. Archbishop Kelly, who was already planning on attending, was Archbishop-designate DiNoia’s spiritual adviser as a seminarian at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington.

After his episcopal ordination, the archbishop-designate will become secretary of the worship congregation. He says “oodles” of his family members will be in attendance for the ceremony at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, as well as more than 100 Dominican priests, four cardinals and at least a dozen bishops.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI gave President Barack Obama a surprise gift this evening: a copy of the Vatican’s document on bioethics and human dignity, which was published in December.

Illustration of an early stage human embryo (CNS)

The document, “Dignitas Personae” (”The Dignity of a Person”), was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Strangely enough, about four hours before Obama arrived, I was in the Vatican bookstore. While I was trying to pay, the cashier was interrupted by a phone call and she made me wait while she went to the shelves. She pulled  the last two English copies of the document off the shelf and put them on her desk.

Msgr. Georg Ganswein, the pope’s personal secretary, told reporters the document would help Obama understand the church’s reasoning behind its efforts to protect human life at every stage of its development.

Homelessness among families jumped 9 percent in 2008, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported.

Homelessness for families grew primarily in rural and suburban areas of the country, the agency said.

Members of homeless families now make up nearly a third of all homeless people in the country, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan told reporters during a July 9 telephone conference.

In releasing the agency’s Annual Homeless Assessment Report, Donovan said statistics showed that 1.4 million people were homeless for at least one night in 2008.

On one night in January 2008, when HUD conducts its annual census of homeless people,  the report showed that 664,000 people were without shelter or a bed.

The highest concentrations of homeless people were found in California, Hawaii, Nevada and Oregon.

Half of all homeless people were in four states — California, Florida, Michigan and New York. Twenty percent of all homeless people were in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York City.

The full report will be posted at some point on the HUD Web site at www.hud.gov.

Donovan told reporters in a telephone conference call that the number of people who are homeless held steady between 2007 and 2008, but that data was collected before the full impact of the housing crisis hit last year.

The secretary also announced that $1.5 billion was being released through the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program to local communities to offer assistance to families and individuals who are facing homelessness or are already homeless.

The money is part of the $787 billion economic stimulus package passed by Congress in February.

CNS will provide additional coverage of the issue of homelessness in the coming weeks.

Don’t want to spend hours scrolling through a Web site in order to read the pope’s new encyclical? Then order a copy of Origins, the CNS Documentary Service, where you can get it in an easy-to-read format. Call (202) 541-3290.

Frank Kolarek (CNS/Owen Sweeney III, The Catholic Review)

Summer is the time for baseball and softball. At least it is in my life.

Even at 52, after years of running on all kinds of diamonds — from the beautifully manicured to makeshift fields high with weeds – I find there’s nothing as exhilarating as sending a line drive over second base to plate a run or making a play no one thought I’d make. 

In Baltimore, fellow baseball lover Frank Kolarek feels the same way.

A former minor leaguer in the Oakland Athletics organization,  Kolarek continues to share is love of the game in Maryland.

The Catholic Review in Baltimore has a story by Matt Palmer about Kolarek’s devotion to baseball and his effort to bring the game to adults and children with special needs through his League of Dreams.

For his effort as league president and founder he was selected to attend the Major League All-Star Game in St. Louis July 14. A parishioner at St. Mark Parish in suburban Catonsville, Kolarek was voted by fans to represent the Baltimore Orioles at the game under the All-Stars Among Us awards program sponsored by Major League Baseball and People magazine.

Kolarek was nominated by his son, Adam, a rising star on the University of Maryland baseball team.

He told the newspaper his greatest joy comes when he’s at a game and he closes his eyes to listen.

“When you do that, you hear kids laughing,” he said. “You don’t see anybody’s disability.”

The Trenton, N.J., Diocese’s video-sharing site, Dottube, seems to be the first of its kind.

Dioceses and churches have claimed their own YouTube channels or posted videos on diocesan or parish Web sites, but debuting a separate site may be new territory, according to leaders for the Catholic Academy for Communications Arts Professionals.

“I don’t know of any that have taken that step,” said Frank Morock, president of that organization and communications director for the Diocese of Raleigh, N.C., which he said was the first diocese in the world with its own Web site. Nationally, there is My Catholic Voice for video sharing. 

“I commend them because a number of dioceses don’t have the capability of using media to get the message out,” he said about Trenton.

Its new site has given a home to diocesan television productions “Realfaith TV” and “The Catholic Corner” and radio production “Black Catholics, Yes!” It also allows parishes and ministry groups — such as youth groups, the Knights of Columbus, Catholic schools, campus ministries and adult faith formation groups — to create and share original content, said Rayanne Bennett, diocesan communications officer.

One parish actively posts content thus far. Site activity is expected to increase in the fall, after parents have signed waivers for their children to participate.

Only group leaders can post videos to the site, but anyone can sign up and post comments, which are moderated. These restrictions make it a safer environment than YouTube, where children can navigate to questionable “related videos.”

The diocese launched Dottube in March, five months after the idea was pitched by the Office of Radio and Television and the Hispanic Apostolate, said Ken Perry, Web department director. It cost between $15,000 and $18,000 to start the site, and it will cost $10,000 to host each year. Morock said dioceses will probably look at the option because after start-up costs, it’s not expensive to achieve a decent picture and understandable audio.

“Anything that advances getting the word out, I applaud,” he said.

Bennett and Perry said the site has the potential to attract non-Catholics to the faith if users link videos to their blogs. Moreover, it may enrich the faith experience of those who are Catholic, such as parents who visit the site to see videos or pictures of their children and notice such features as online adult catechesis classes. In this way, it serves a similar purpose to diocesan newspapers.

The diocese also manages independent Web sites for its vocations and Respect Life offices and the Bishop’s Annual Appeal.

A group of faith-based peace activists will lead a small contingent to Japan to mark the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to apologize for the U.S. action.

“We want to acknowledge the tremendous damage done by our country, by what has happened,” long time Tacoma, Wash., peace advocate Jesuit Father Bill Bichsel told Catholic News Service. “We wish to attach ourselves to the continued work of nuclear abolition.”

The trip gets under way July 31. Sixteen people from various faith traditions will make the journey to the two cities on the anniversaries of the bombings: Aug. 6 for Hiroshima, Aug. 9 for Nagasaki. The group includes Dominican Sister Teresa Montes, Franciscan Father Louis Vitale, Catholic Worker and U.S. Navy veteran Tom Karlin and Mitch Kohjima, a former Buddhist monk.

Father Bichsel, 81, who has committed acts of civil disobedience to express his opposition to the nuclear weapons present at the Naval Base Kitsap near Seattle, has been working with Bishop Joseph Atsumi Misue of Hiroshima and Archbishop Joseph Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki to coordinate activities.

The apology is necessary in order to begin to repent for the sins of war, Father Bichsel said.

“What we have done not only has inflicted tremendous damage on the Japanese, it also has done tremendous damaged on the (American) people when we don’t remember what we have done,” he said.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI has placed the commission responsible for relations with traditionalist Catholics under the authority of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as he announced four months ago he intended to do.

In a brief note published this morning, Pope Benedict accepted the resignation of 80-year-old Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos as president of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei,” which since 1988 has been charged with outreach to the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X as well as with assisting Catholics attached to the pre-Vatican II liturgy.

Cardinal William J. Levada (CNS/Rick Delvecchio, Catholic San Francisco)

As president of the commission, the pope named U.S. Cardinal William J. Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The pope also named Italian Msgr. Guido Pozzo, assistant secretary of the International Theological Commission and a staff member of the doctrinal congregation, to serve as secretary of “Ecclesia Dei.”

The Vatican also released today the formal papal document reorganizing the office.

In a March letter to the world’s bishops explaining why he had lifted the excommunication of four bishops ordained against Vatican orders by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Pope Benedict had announced his intention to place the commission under the guidance of the doctrinal congregation.

In the letter, the pope said excommunications were a disciplinary measure affecting the four bishops, but the fact that the Society of St. Pius X has no standing in the church is due to doctrinal reasons.

“Until the doctrinal questions are clarified, the society has no canonical status in the church, and its ministers — even though they have been freed of the ecclesiastical penalty — do not legitimately exercise any ministry in the church,” the pope had written.

Placing “Ecclesia Dei” under the doctrinal congregation, he had said, “will make it clear that the problems now to be addressed are essentially doctrinal in nature and concern primarily the acceptance of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar magisterium of the popes.”

Victoria Cavanaugh is just 23, a 2007 graduate of Boston College, and, oh yeah, she founded Nuestro Ahora, a scholarship program for orphans in El Salvador. It’s a fledgling but remarkably ambitious endeavor, especially considering Cavanaugh started it just two years ago with money she had saved up from campus and summer jobs.

Victoria Cavanaugh, far right, with four university students from Nuestro Ahora. (CNS/Nuestro Ahora)

She recently talked with Catholic News Service about the formation of Nuestro Ahora. Here are some links and information that couldn’t fit in that article:

In picking the destination for her semester abroad, Cavanaugh chose to go to El Salvador with La Casa de Solidaridad (House of Solidarity), a service-learning program through Santa Clara Univeristy in California.

Besides taking university classes at Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamerica in San Salvador, she also volunteered at Comunidad de Oscar Arnulfo Romero (COAR), an orphanage dedicated to the memory of Archbishop Romero. Most of these children are orphans of poverty and violence — meaning they still have living parents, but those parents can no longer provide a safe and nurturing home.

It was the example Cavanaugh saw at COAR that ultimately led to her setting up the university scholarship program that would be the foundation of Nuestro Ahora.

It’s really pretty remarkable that someone who started a program fresh out of college has been this successful in helping the children of El Salvador’s orphanages. Nuestro Ahora (Our Time) provided full university scholarships to four Salvadoran students last year and kept 14 high school students on track for college with regular mentoring and prep classes.

It costs anywhere from $3,000 to $3,500 a year to send the university students to their various colleges in San Salvador as well as provide groceries, clothing, and other supplies for the Nuestro Ahora house.

To facilitate funding and stablity, Cavanaugh completed the arduous task of making Nuestro Ahora a nonprofit organization. First she registered it as a corporation in Massachusetts, got nonprofit designation in that state, then finally received legal recognition as a nonprofit in the United States. Nuestro Ahora is due to receive the same recognition in El Salvador this summer.

“All of the legal recognition simply serves to make Nuestro Ahora Inc. more transparent and stable,” Cavanaugh said in an e-mail to CNS. “The public can find all of our financial and legal records online … past IRS forms, etc.”

The nonprofit status also makes it easier and more attractive for benefactors to donate.

With the 501(c)(3) designation as a nonprofit, “donors who work for certain corporations may be able to ask their company to match their gift, doubling their contribution,” Cavanuagh explained. Donations to a nonprofit are tax-deductible.

If you want to help out Nuestro Ahora, instructions on how to donate are on the Web site .

Cavanaugh said college students often tell her they want to help but can’t afford to donate extra money or go down to El Salvador themselves. So Cavanaugh registered Nuestro Ahora with the sites Goodsearch.com and Goodshop.com. All you have to do is type “Nuestro Ahora (Easthampton, MA)” as your charity of choice, and the sites will donate a few cents each time they are used in the program’s name.

OK, I’ll admit I’m not a big fan of “word clouds,” those graphical representations of how often a particular word appears in a document. But this one works. CNS graphics artist Emily Thompson created it using the words that appear in Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate” (”Charity in Truth”). The words “human” and “development” jump right out at you. And that’s what this encyclical is all about.

(CNS graphic/Emily Thompson)