It’s an honor to present two stories we have been working on for some time, and are able to bring you in this issue.

In the first, Sue Ellin Browder has put together an impressive amount of information about how condom promotion actually increases AIDS rates.

Too often, it is considered axiomatic that the wisdom of the world has the best answers in issues like AIDS, and the stick-in-the-mud Church is preventing progress.

But God’s law is never second-best. When the Church teaches sexual morality, she is teaching what God himself has revealed to us about what is the best way to live.

The second story is Wayne Laugesen’s report on a recent series of stories by the Associated Press. That news agency did a service to all of us by drawing the public’s attention to the scandal of sex abuse in the nation’s public schools.

Journalists also did a service by drawing our attention to scandals in the Catholic Church, insofar as the attention helped bring about needed reforms.

However, the way the media handled the scandal, by blowing it out of proportion and acting as if all priests were somehow suspicious, was a terrible disservice. The fact that so few of these same journalists are willing to cover the scandal in the public schools suggests that their interest in the story had more to do with targeting the Church than it did with targeting the abuse of children.

In the face of all these terrible, global problems, it can seem that individual Christians are helpless. The Church gives us Advent as a time to renew our own faith and our own commitment to the Church’s mission.

We help you do that every Advent with our clip-out and pass-on guides to spreading the faith.

This week, we give you the tools you need to promote Sunday Mass. You can print out these guides on your own computer by clicking on “Resources” at NCRegister.com.