“Everyone is coming to church seeking a word of comfort and consolation, which they don’t find anywhere else. You hear gun and mortar shots everywhere. We don’t know where they are coming from or where they are aimed; we only know that they bring death and destruction.”
— Bishop Giuseppe Nazzaro, Latin-rite apostolic vicar of Aleppo, Syria, speaking about Christmas Eve and Christmas Day Masses in the war-torn city

“We are creating authentic Catholic campuses inside secular ones. If we want a way to change the culture of campus life and affect the future of our country, this is a big way of doing that. We can’t sit back and watch these kids go uncatechized. We’ve got to do something, and we are.”
— Matt Zerrusen, president of the Newman Student Housing Fund, which is financing a new residence hall for Catholic students at the Florida Institute of Technology, one of the first such efforts in the nation at a secular university

“When they leave, they don’t come back. My message to them is to stay, stay, stay, but if they don’t stay I understand, without justifying this departure.”
— Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal of Jerusalem, in his Christmas message in which he noted the decreasing number of Christians — currently slightly more than 1,330 — living in Gaza

“Any deficit reduction agreement or framework for future reform must protect the refundability of low-income tax credits, the charitable deduction and the millions of people who benefit from them.”
— Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines, Iowa, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, and Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, Calif., chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, in a letter to Congress as the country moved closer to an end-of-year series of automatic spending cuts and the end of Bush-era tax cuts