“To meet its moral obligations to the Iraqi people, it is critically important that the United States take additional steps now to help Iraq protect its citizens, especially Christians and others who are victims of organized attacks.”
— Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, in a Nov. 9 letter to U.S. President Barack Obama

“We may not have known who Honus Wagner was before this, but his name is blessed to us now.”
— Sister Virginia Muller, former treasurer for the Atlantic-Midwest province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, which will receive $220,000 from the auction of a very rare T206 Honus Wagner baseball card that was donated to them

“It is a precious tool which the bishop of Rome cannot and will not go without.”
— Pope Benedict XVI, in a Nov. 11 letter to the Vatican archivist remarking on the importance of the Vatican Library as a new exhibit highlighting the 500-year-old institution opened at the Vatican

“It’s for me, above all, a response of thanksgiving to God for having survived. It is my contribution to the rebuilding of the country, but at the level of the spiritual and the human.”
— Father Alphonse Quesnel, a Montfortian priest serving as pastor of a parish in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who has put together an “earthquake catechesis” consisting of reflections, songs and prayers for survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake

“We’re treating this monument as a sign of faith — an external manifestation that religious belief is still alive here.”
— Father Andrzej Sapieha, spokesman for Poland’s Zielona Gora-Gorzow Diocese, commenting on efforts by a parish in western Poland that will dedicate later this month what it says is the world’s largest statue of Christ