Cardinals

As their church's cardinals gathered in Vatican City to select a new pope, Catholic schoolchildren in the Baltimore area joined the worldwide buzz over the secret balloting process in an online chat with a fairly well-placed source: Archbishop William E. Lori. "I'm not going to predict who the Holy Father is going to be," Lori told eighth-grade students at 20 schools in the Baltimore Archdiocese on Monday. "But what we can't miss is that at least two of the American cardinals have been spoken about as possible candidates.

Since the resignation of Pope Benedict, we have been treated to the truly tawdry spectacle of life in the Vatican at this time in history. There are stories of Papal shoes, rings, palaces and castles. We see pictures of old men dressed in ecclesiastical finery sitting in palatial rooms at the Vatican. There are stories of corruption and jockeying for position among the cardinals. We are informed of the number old men who will have voting rights at the conclave called to elect the new pope.

As 11 American Roman Catholic cardinals join with their colleagues in Rome to elect the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, it is interesting to note that three cardinals who visited Baltimore during the last century were eventually elected pope. The first to visit Baltimore was Cardinal Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, who was then Papal secretary of state. The future Pope Pius XII paid what The Baltimore Sun called a "fleeting visit" on Oct. 21, 1936. "The occasion marked the first time a Papal Secretary of State ever has visited the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the Prime See of the United States," reported the newspaper.

If Congress fails to deal with the looming threat of sequestration, March 1 will be devastating for millions of Americans. That will be the day that automatic, across-the-board spending cuts begin to take effect - cutting $1.2 trillion from defense and nondefense programs over the next 10 years. Sequestration was scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, but the American Taxpayer Relief Act delayed it until March 1. Time is running out, and we must find a way to work together to reduce our deficit and avoid sequestration.

Maryland Del. Jon Cardin , who along with Del. Dana Stein introduced a bill Friday that would mandate protective headgear for girls youth lacrosse programs, said the purpose of the bill is to start a conversation about player safety in girls lacrosse. "The idea is to start a serious conversation about the safety and protection of student and youth athletes," Cardin said. "This will be high up on the agenda of discussion of how to make sure we're doing everything we can to keep student athletes safe.

Sen. Ben Cardin had a simple request of researchers at the National Institutes of Health looking for ways to defend their funding from looming budget cuts: "Put a face on this. " "You're real people," the Maryland Democrat told hundreds of federal workers Friday at a town hall meeting. "You have real lives. You've got families, and you're on the front lines of public service. Public service. Don't be afraid to point that out. "So help us with personalizing what you do on behalf of your country.

They came to pay off a wager, but they couldn't escape a little trash talk. California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer walked humbly to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski's Capitol Hill hideaway on Thursday to pay off their Super Bowl bet, showering Mikulski and Sen. Ben Cardin with cheese, wine and crab -- the West Coast variety. "This is real crab," Feinstein said as she handed a Dungeness crab to the Maryland senators. "It was caught a few days ago in a trap off of the Golden Gate Bridge...It comes with our deepest congratulations.

When Gilman's Shane Cockerille and Calvert Hall's Delando Johnson sign their national letters of intent to accept football scholarships Wednesday morning, they won't be at school. They'll be 1,300 miles away in Austin, Texas. Instead of signing beside their high school teammates, the rivals will join some of the nation's other top high school seniors who are also playing in Tuesday night's fourth annual International Bowl. Cockerille, headed to Maryland, and Johnson, headed for Toledo, plan to sign at the 2013 National Signing Day Breakfast in Austin on the first day of the signing period for football, soccer and several other sports.

Del. Jon Cardin said Wednesday that he has reached an agreement with the Maryland Transportation Authority that will pre-empt a bill he filed requiring the agency to report how much money it failed to collect because of toll violations in E-ZPass lanes. Cardin said he had negotiated an agreement with Harold Bartlett, executive secretary of the authority, that will bring more transparency to the agency's toll collection efforts. The Baltimore County Democrat said the authority agreed to post on its web site information about its fine collection efforts as well as the amounts of uncollected fines.