Steve Krueger, national director of Catholic Democrats, describes Democratic religious outreach this year as "a work in progress."

"The Democrats' faith outreach in 2010 hasn't been anything like it was in 2008. They really needed to ramp up their faith outreach, and they haven't done that," says one religion writer.

Gay marriage is not a campaign issue in Minnesota, but the Catholic archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis recently sent a message opposing it to every Catholic family in the state. Father David McCauley says it's an effort "to make Catholic people aware of Catholic teaching."

Benedict has increased the number of Italians and Vatican bureaucrats in the College of Cardinals, observes Thomas Reese, SJ, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

The Catholic Church once excommunicated her for uncovering a priestly sex abuse case, but now Mother Mary MacKillop has been canonized in Rome, and she is being celebrated "down under."

Physical healing and spiritual care go hand in hand at a no-frills health care clinic in Tutwiler, Mississippi directed by Dr. Anne Brooks, a Catholic nun.

If you are a patient who is poor, says this doctor-nun, "sometimes in this society you're taught not to care about yourself…You're denigrated. You're just not an important person."

One of the biggest challenges of Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the United Kingdom is how to make the case for the Christian faith in a nation known for its growing religious indifference.

"The fear people have is that if my child is raised in the other parent’s religion, then the child will grow closer to the other parent," says one interfaith family mediator.

In a new book, this historian and professor of international relations writes that America's long military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq "demonstrated the folly of imagining that war could be mastered" and demolished "Washington's pretensions to moral superiority."