The 40 Days for Life fall campaign launched on Sept. 28, and it’s already running ahead of the spring campaign (which turned out to be the largest to date) — it looks like it will be a record-setter.

This morning from North Dakota, campaign director Shawn Carney told me that since fall of 2007, when 40 Days for Life
was launched as a national coordinated effort, usually the fall campaign has been the larger effort.

But the final tallies this past May saw 80,000 participants at a record 247 locations across the United States, plus in Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, Spain, Armenia and Georgia. There were 714 lives known to be saved from abortion. Plus 10 workers at abortion facilities...READ MORE

As we approach October, the month of the Holy Rosary, and the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on Oct. 7, there’s a grassroots effort via the Web to remember the origin of the feast and win our country back to Jesus.

The Lepanto Victory Mission Rosary novena wants to enlist people in all 50 states to unite to pray a Rosary for the U.S. during one or more of the 216 hours making up the round-the-clock, nine-day novena leading up to the feast. The intention is “peace and victory of God for our country.”

The Rosary novena begins first thing Sept. 29, the feast of the Archangels, and goes continuously until the end of Oct. 7.

The organization was inspired by the miraculous victory...READ MORE

Did you hear about this?

Facebook allows users to indicate that they are expecting a child. Under the “Friends and Family” section, users can list “Expected: Child.” Parents can even list a due date and the baby’s name.

Pro-lifers are taking note.

It’s good to see a pro-life development in social media.

Thinking of starting a Catholic book club after reading our recent feature?

Or just looking for some good reads?

Head to CatholicSummerReading.com for ideas.

Happy reading!

A reader wrote to tell us he has had a difficult time finding the first-class stamp with the beautiful portrait of a smiling Mother Teresa on it.

The stamp was issued on Sept. 5, 2010, in honor of her 100th birthday, and he had been buying it for several months.

The reader’s main post office in a large Southern city was out of the stamps and hadn’t reordered, he was told, because the stamps weren’t selling well.

But then he did find one suburban town that had a moderate supply. The postal employees expressed sadness that the Mother Teresa stamp would be discontinued.

I was told by a U.S. Postal Service stamp specialist that there will be no more printings.

But there is good news....READ MORE

In case you missed it last night, here’s a video clip of our senior editor, Joan Frawley Desmond, on Raymond Arroyo’s EWTN news program The World Over last night. Joan has been following the Father Corapi story closely.

You want to pray a Rosary for your family or our Blessed Mother’s intentions, so you reach into your pocket or purse — only to find your rosary’s not there. You know you have trouble concentrating if you count the decades on your fingers.

But you do happen to have your Kindle — so you can still pray that Rosary, following along each “bead” if you download Pray the Rosary Bead by Bead: Formatted to Mimic Rosary Beads by Michael Hart (available through Amazon.com for $2.49 in the United States and United Kingdom).

Hart, who hails from the Little Rock suburb of Benton, Ark., explained how he got the idea in May.

“Last month, the month of Mary,” he began when we chatted the other day, “Pope...READ MORE

The new Holy Wood Acting Studio in Culver City, west of Los Angeles — which promises to bring back morality and Catholic sensibility to the art of acting and to Hollywood itself — got quite a boost and blessing the other day.

Days before the studio’s official opening Mass on Pentecost Sunday, June 12, and the launch of the very first classes on Monday, June 13, the school received a letter of endorsement from Los Angeles’ new archbishop, Jose Gomez.

“To have the approval of the Catholic Church means the world to us,” Holy Wood’s co-founder and director of operations, Max Espinosa, told me. “My first thought was that we’re doing it the way God wants it.”

Espinosa said the archbishop knew...READ MORE