As the Passaic Neighborhood Center for Women marks its sixth anniversary, it continues to maintain its identity as a place to empower women — many of whom have traveled far from home to make a better life for their families here. With more than 10,000 visits through its doors in the past six years, it is evident how important the mission of the center is in serving these women.

While it is important Church leaders remain focused on serving the people’s pastoral and spiritual needs, today’s world requires them to also be connected with managing a parish on an administrative and organizational level. To better equip church leaders, pastors and business managers, the Villanova School of Business Center for Church Management is offering a church management webcast series,

Members of the youth group at St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Mountain Lakes spent July 14 to 20 on a mission trip with more than 250 teens from around the country in Boston for the Catholic Heart Work Camp (CHWC). They worked together to paint houses, build fences, and complete yard work and landscaping for needy families.

Director Michael J. Wickham gives 150 “extras” of a fictitious congregation, dressed in their Sunday best, instructions about how to make the Sign of the Cross, before shooting an Ordination Mass scene for a movie in St. Cecilia Church in Englewood. Then, he takes his perch behind a camera and yells “Action!” to start the scene, which shows the congregation clapping, as a procession, which includes a few actors playing newly ordained priests, exits the church, bathed in plumes of incense.

Resonating the lyrics of a popular reggae song, young people from St. Michael Parish here acted with “one love, one heart” to serve some of the poorest and most forgotten people on a mission trip to Jamaica. For one week in late July, the Netcong missionaries traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, the capital of the Caribbean country spending time with orphans, the disabled and those living with HIV.

In 2009, President Barack Obama issued an executive order that allowed for federally-funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) using embryonic stem cells. Catholic teaching respects the dignity and the equal moral worth of every human person. This view has consistently rejected research that destroys the life of some in order enhance the life of others.

The strident opening strumming of an acoustic guitar introduces “Meet Me Where I Am” right away as a driving pop-rocker, while its first verse almost seems a set up to a song about romantic love. A few lyrics later, Dan Ferrari makes it clear that he is looking to heaven for the love he seeks — and has found. The CD was written and sung by Ferrari, minister to young adults ages 21-29 at St. Paul Inside the Walls: the Diocesan Center for Evangeli­zation at Bayley-Ellard in Madison.

On May 11, Joanne Ponnwitz of Our Lady of Good Counsel (OLGC) Parish, Pompton Plains, ascended the stage at Drew University to receive her Doctor of Ministry. Her hard work — three years of rigorous academic research and writing — resulted in a boost to her level of personal satisfaction, but more importantly to the certification and ongoing faith-formation opportunities the Diocese offers parish catechists.

It quickly became a matter of trust. On the night of July 12, a group of high-school-age teens from the new Young Prophets youth ministry at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Paterson had fun taking turns wearing a blindfold, while struggling to navigate an obstacle course — a crooked trail of cups and pylons — on the Cathedral’s lawn. After each teen would start to knock into the obstacles, another teen would step in to help him or her through the second half of the course.

Pope Francis has approved a miracle attributed to Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, making possible the American television evangelist's beatification. The Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints promulgated the decree approving Sheen’s miracle on July 6.

Bishop Serratelli made a pastoral visit to Assumption of the Blessed Mary Church in Morristown where he celebrated Mass to mark the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time on July 28.

Parishioners of St. Mary Help of Christians Parish in Paterson welcomed Bishop Serratelli on his pastoral visit to the parish July 27, where he served as main celebrant and homilist of the vigil Mass in Spanish marking the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time.

The recent news in our state of three abandoned babies in a six-day period — two newborns and an infant — point to the urgency of getting the message out to every resident of the state that New Jersey has had a safe haven law in place since 2000.