I’ll always remember what I heard a particularly weary priest say in an open forum of his colleagues 20 years ago.

Even now, 20 years later, the truth of what Patricia Sandoval witnessed first-hand inside a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Sacramento, California, is hard medicine to take, especially for those who refuse to accept it.

When Pope John Paul II walked down the stairs from the second-floor bedroom of Archbishop Philip Hannan’s residence in 1987 – the pontiff was leaving for a flight to San Antonio, the next stop on his historic visit to the U.S. – the engineer’s gene in Peter Quirk, a man who always did his homework, prompted him to prepare yet another plan.

The first inkling Gilly Charbonnet had that something was wrong with his body came when he began having trouble tying his shoes and buttoning his shirt.

Bouncing off the gray, cement-block walls and muted lighting of a prison holding area, the self-composed music of pianist Eric Genuis, along with the haunting accompaniment of a cello, a violin and a vocalist, erupts in a technicolor of sound.

When I wrote a whimsical New Year’s Eve sports prediction column last December in homage to my late father – who penned his for more than a half-century as a columnist for The States-Item and The Times-Picayune – the common thread was my grave doubt that the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board could dogpaddle fast enough to rise above its well-earned public reputation as the aquatic version of the 1980 Saints.

Full disclosure. I was born and reared in south Louisiana. I don’t hunt. I’ve fired a shotgun once in my life, at an outdoor gun range on the West Bank. I hit a few clay targets.

The first time I met School Sister of Notre Dame Rose Elaine Kessler, a proud daughter of the 9th Ward, she pointed to the bulletin board in the hallway outside her office.

Gloria and Preston Cifreo of St. Benilde Parish in Metairie located the final resting place of 2nd Lt. Samuel H.P. Wright of New Orleans, a combat engineer who died on June 22, 1944, in a rocket attack at St. Lo – 16 days after D-Day.

You’ve heard the strained logic and strawman argument before from an abortion-rights supporter near you: “Pro-lifers are not pro-life – they are simply pro-birth. As soon as the baby is born, all their concern for life ends.”

On June 6, 1944, U.S. Army Capt. Frank Humphrey Walk was 23 – three years out of LSU with a mechanical engineering degree – when battlefield chaos propelled him suddenly into a command position with the Engineer Special Brigade Group on Omaha Beach off the Normandy coast.

Seven children from St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie got a close-up view of the Litany of the Saints as eight ordinands for the priesthood in the Archdiocese of New Orleans lay prostrate June 1 at St. Louis Cathedral. Getting the angel’s eyeview of the Ordination Mass were Ramsey Macicek, Ella Brulet, Reagan Macicek, Olivia Brulet, Sophie Wilken, Connor Wilken and Henry Wilken. They were friends of ordinand Father Andrew Gutierrez. (see above photo)

The fiat in May 2012 by the Newhouse family – or, more accurately, by the Newhouse kids – to make New Orleans a three-day-a-week newspaper town was a litmus test for greed, arrogance and willful disenfranchisement.

It was 1985, and the HIV-AIDS tsunami was crashing ashore in every American city. Inside Holy Trinity Church in Faubourg Marigny – a stately church built in the 19th century for German Catholics – Father Paul Desrosiers was burying one more person.

To look at Maureen Pratt is not to see the face of disability. For more than 20 years, Pratt, a Catholic writer, has suffered from lupus, an autoimmune disease that attacks the body’s organs and can make any day – nearly  every day – feel like the end of the world. But no one peering in from the outside would ever notice her pain.

In the pre-Google map days, Mike Orkus was doing what any veteran Catholic school educator does in fulfilling the “other duties” section of his job description. Following afternoon band practice at Holy Cross School in the Lower 9th Ward, Orkus would take off on a nomadic, 50-mile route, from Chalmette to Kenner, to drop off 40 middle-school students to their homes.

Matt Fradd, 35, a native of Australia, has a simple proposition: Since the world has changed, parents need to recognize that and take action. One of the world’s foremost Catholic experts on the scourge of pornography, Fradd was 12 years old when his life spiraled out of control. He spent a lot of time at the rural home of his best friend, whose mom would supply them with hard liquor and allow them to watch pornographic videos.

It takes about three steps to walk across Orville Duggan’s 135-square-foot office, which reveals a minimalist story about the chief administrative officer of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans.

Harry Connick Sr. will be 93 on March 27, and now that he’s all grown up, he feels as though he may have discovered what he wants to do with his life. For 30 years – from 1973 to 2003 – Connick was the Orleans Parish District Attorney, a pressurized cauldron that forced him to confront society in its darkest moments. In 1994, a virulent drug war that created a turf battle, led to 424 murders in New Orleans, the most in the city’s history.

The “rock bottom” for Katherine Madere, a cradle Catholic, came in 2015, when she could no longer, on her own, put together the jigsaw pieces of a cratered life. Madere was newly sober and had been living for two months at Grace House, a long-term residential treatment center for women who are struggling with drug or alcohol abuse.