With all the diversity that exists in this world, there is one common denominator. Anyone who may be reading this, regardless of, race, creed, gender, country of origin or political views, all have a woman who at one particular day in time gave birth to you.

On this month’s “Our Daily Bread,” host Father Paul D. Seil is alone in the kitchen talking about how food and faith have gone together for years.

Over a year after the devastation in Haiti, many people around the world have moved on to new crises, yet the people in Haiti are still struggling to survive. Sister M. Johnice Rzadkiewicz, CSSF and Mike Gilhooly from the Diocese of Buffalo recently traveled to Haiti in an effort to continue to help rebuild the ravaged country.

Archbishop Walsh Academy has just become a world-class school. The International Baccalaureate Organization has designated the Olean school as an IB World School authorized to offer the Diploma Programme in the fall of 2011. With this award, Walsh will be one of only 2 percent of the high schools in the United States certified to offer this program.

Secular media often breezes over the most important of details. The oft repeated headline after the announcement of Pope John Paul II’s May 1 beatification was, “Pope Benedict XVI puts John Paul II on the fast track to sainthood.”

The beatification of Pope John Paul II has brought back a flood of memories for several people in the Diocese of Buffalo who have met the man credited with toppling communism in Eastern Europe, improving relationships with the Jewish community and standing firm in Church teaching amid a changing culture.

Those simple words, “be not afraid,” launched the papacy of Blessed John Paul II, beatified at the Vatican on May 1 by his successor, Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope John Paul II’s humor, as I experienced it, tended toward the ironic: not in the post-modern sense, in which irony is the short road to cynicism, but in the more venerable sense of irony as a recognition that we’re not in charge of our own lives, and that we play the fool if we try to control everything.

Personal stories of the newly Blessed John Paul II are the focus of May’s “Matters of Faith,” as host Kevin A. Keenan welcomes guests who knew the previous pontiff personally, as well as those whose lives he has impacted from afar.

As mental illness is a condition that impacts one out of four families, addressing those issues is a growing concern in the United States. It’s one in which a special fellowship at St. Joseph University Church in Buffalo hopes to address with an event at 7 p.m. Monday, May 16.