I grew up, like most Catholics, thinking that Lent was a gloomy season when we stopped singing "Alleluia!" and eating candy because we had to be sorry for our sins for 40 days. The only good part about Lent was that I just might get to go to the parish fish fry on Friday evening and run around with my grade school buddies. Sadly, I'm not sure that my understanding of Lent matured much more than that until recent years.

See for Yourself - Recently a friend told me about the death of a classmate who was living four states away. I was shocked to hear of the death, so the friend sent me to the e-obituary on a newspaper's website.

"We too can be hands, arms and hearts which help God to perform his miracles, so often hidden."

The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, internationally known for their work defending the rights of the poor, especially women and children in rural areas, started their services in Vietnam in 1928 and now have more than 600 nuns in service. Sr. Pascale Le Thi Triu is part of a bureau where lay professionals in the fields of social work, special education, health care, counseling, law, architecture, environment and finance offer to work with the sisters in more than 50 centers located mostly in remote and mountain regions.

In the Ugandan slum of Kamwookya, there's a small school called the Sr. Miriam Duggan Primary School. It caters to children whose families were displaced from Acholiland in the north of the country, forcing them to seek refuge in the capital, Kampala. Many of these families struggle with poverty and HIV, and some of the students are orphans. The school is named after one of the country's leading pioneers in home care for those with HIV/AIDS.

Eleven years ago on February 12, 2005, Sr. Dorothy Stang, my sister in the congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, was murdered. She was gunned down by assassins hired by local ranchers. Dorothy's tireless work for the rights of the dispossessed and the protection of the Amazon rainforest stood in the way of the profits of logging and cattle ranching. Since her murder, people gather each year in late July to remember Dorothy and to recommit to the work of justice and land reform by walking the Romaria da Floresta (Pilgrimage of the Forest), a 34-mile journey.

Poet Wendall Berry, 81, is passing on his family's farming legacy to a new generation; he selected a small Catholic liberal arts college about an hour's drive from Louisville, run by the Dominican Sisters of Peace, to continue the Berry Farming Program, which offers an interdisciplinary approach to agriculture, combining fieldwork with philosophy and studies in agricultural science and agribusiness with classes on literature, history and culture.

Three Stats and a Map - Last month Oxfam released a report, which revealed that 62 people own as much money as the poorest half of the world's population combined. (For the record, that's 3.6 billion people.)