At this time of year, it’s typical for newspapers, magazines, TV programs and radio stations to produce “year in review” segments for their audiences. The Catholic Standard & Times this week also presents our look back at 2008, and what an eventful, remarkable year it was.
Some media are fond of naming a “Person of the Year.” Not a few have chosen Barack Obama, which is not surprising. Joining him on the list of candidates are various politicians and public figures, including our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. This newspaper offers for consideration not a single person, but the subject on the back page of every edition: our profile of the week.
Readers of the CS&T meet a Catholic person each week who lives the Lord’s call to lead a life of holiness and love of God and neighbor through the Church, and in the world (in this neck of the woods).
Looking back on our subjects for the past year, you’ve met an earnest boy making his first confession and a spirited girl with arthritis inspiring compassion in others. You’ve learned how young men and women are heeding Jesus’ call to follow a vocation to priesthood or religious life. Elderly men and women speak about volunteering their time – in most cases, decades – in service through the Church. Men and women at the height of their careers articulate their own inspiring journeys of faith.
Fifty times a year, readers learn about men, women and children, from lay to religious to ordained clergy, people well known or gratefully private.
Each of our subjects represents a great many more people in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia also living their Christian vocations to the best of their ability. No doubt they would agree that living the Christian life is not easy and marked by challenges of all kinds and occasional gifts of grace. But because they do speak about their lives with candor, every reader can be inspired and experience in a deeper way the communion of life and love that we share as members of the Body of Christ, the Church.
Our profile subjects represent the heroic, everyday lives of faithful Catholics among us in parishes and schools in the Archdiocese. They might never appear on the cover of a national news magazine. But they and all the anonymous Catholics they represent may truly be called our “persons of the year.”
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