TORONTO - The 50th anniversary of the International Eucharistic Congress will be a time of communion, reflection and renewal of faith, says Fr. Kevin Doran, secretary general of the congress to be held next year in Dublin.

With the theme “The Eucharist: Communion with Christ and with one another,” the congress will be held June 10 to 17, 2011 in the Irish capital.

IMUS, Philippines - On a recent Sunday morning, Nemie Anciado squinted against the searing sun shining on the doorway of the crowded Our Lady of the Pillar Cathedral.

Anciado has been a longtime custodian at the cathedral, where Archbishop Luis Tagle served as bishop from 2001 until his recent appointment as head of the Manila archdiocese.

Anciado said he has mixed feelings about Tagle’s new assignment. He said he’s sad to lose him and happy that “he will be able to grow in his new position.”

Self-loathing.

Am I, underneath all I have and have done, worth anything at all? Or is my secret suspicion true, that I’m really nothing? Or nothing good, anyway.

When I was doing parish work, I found this question lurking hidden in the hearts of a surprising number of people — including people whom the rest of us might readily consider better, smarter or better-off than ourselves. Next time you walk down the street, imagine those you see having a huge rock on top of their head or great bulging sacks hanging from each hand and you may apprehend more than your eyes can see.

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) Nov. 13 (Proverbs 31:10-13, 16-18, 20, 26, 28-31; Psalm 128; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30)

A capable husband, who can find him? Perhaps this would have been the wording of a proverb penned by a woman. Its silence on the matter almost implies that the excellence of the husband is a given.

VATICAN CITY - The feast of All Saints calls on Catholics to see the church as the communion of saints -- as Christ meant it to be -- and not to focus on it as an earthly institution with members who sometimes sin, Pope Benedict XVI said.

"We are called to see the church, not in its temporal and human aspect, marked by fragility, but as Christ wanted it, that is, as the communion of saints," the Pope said Nov. 1 before reciting the Angelus for the feast of All Saints.

VATICAN CITY - Thanking the 300 delegates who joined him for a peace pilgrimage to Assisi, Pope Benedict XVI said they represent billions of people -- believers and nonbelievers -- committed to making the world a better place.

The gathering was "a vivid expression of the fact that every day, throughout the world, people of different religious traditions live and work together in harmony," the Pope told the delegates Oct. 28, the morning after they had gone by train with him to Assisi.

ASSISI, Italy - A common thread ran through many of the speeches and invocations of this year's "prayer for peace" encounter in Assisi: the uneasy sense that the world is facing not merely conflicts and wars, but a much broader crisis that affects social and cultural life in every country.

Environmental damage, the rich-poor divide, erosion of cultural traditions, terrorism and new threats to society's weakest members were cited as increasingly worrisome developments by speakers at the interfaith gathering in the Italian pilgrimage town Oct. 27.

Pope Benedict XVI, addressing the 300 participants, echoed those points in his own analysis of the state of global peace 25 years after Blessed John Paul II convened the first Assisi meeting.

VATICAN CITY - In a quiet modification of a traditional format, the Vatican has dropped most of the individual private meetings between Pope Benedict XVI and bishops making their "ad limina" visits to Rome.

The unannounced change was instituted earlier this year, apparently in an effort to reduce the scheduling burden on the 84-year-old pope and to help cut through the backlog of "ad limina" visits, which are supposed to be made every five years by heads of dioceses.

In place of one-on-one meetings, the pope now usually holds more freewheeling sessions with groups of 7-10 bishops at a time, lasting about an hour. That is expected to be the format for U.S. bishops when they begin their "ad limina" visits in early November.

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) Nov. 6 (Wisdom 6:12-16; Psalm 63; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13)

The encounter of two cultures can be a rich and rewarding experience, especially when both sides are receptive to each other. This was the case when the religion of the Jewish people met Greek culture and philosophy during the three centuries before the coming of Christ. Many Jewish scholars expressed the faith of the Hebrew Scriptures using the symbols and concepts of Greek philosophy. Although the author writes as King Solomon whose wisdom was legendary it was clearly written centuries after the king’s death.

“No community should botch its deaths.” Those are the words of anthropologist Mircea Eliade, and I use them here to introduce a tribute to Otto Herschan, a long-time Catholic publisher who died on July 12 at the age of 84.

For many years he was the publisher and managing director of a number of national Catholic weekly newspapers, including the Catholic Herald in England, the Scottish Catholic Observer and the Irish Catholic. He brought an interesting background to Catholic journalism.