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CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- The Catholic Church in southern Africa is praying for Nelson Mandela, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier said as the 92-year-old anti-apartheid hero returned home after being hospitalized for a respiratory infection.

"Former President Mandela means different things to different people," Cardinal Napier, archbishop of Durban, South Africa, said in a Jan. 28 statement, noting that to his family, Mandela "is a veritable patriarch who stands for and is an example of the virtues of a truly great and loving father, who cares for all near and dear to him."

To South Africans, "he is a great and inspiring leader, a true icon of the ... reconciliation which we still need urgently" and to the international community "he is a unique African and global statesman who rose above personal, tribal, race and party interests in order to lead the South African nation through a difficult transition from apartheid to democracy," he said.

South Africa's first democratically elected president was hospitalized for two days. Hospital officials said the infection was not life threatening and that Mandela remained in good spirits throughout his stay.

VATICAN CITY -- Church leaders were watching the unfolding political drama in Egypt with a mixture of hope for reform and concern over potential violence, said the head of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.

Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa told Vatican Radio Jan. 30 that the widespread unrest that has weakened the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak came as a surprise to Catholics in the region.

I just missed bumping into Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier at the Port-au-Prince airport on Jan. 16. I was already en route back to New York when he returned from exile and, in an unexpected and stunning move, uprooted Haiti's political landscape. Already friends and colleagues in Haiti tell me that Port-au-Prince is abuzz with rumors. Can a return by former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide be next?

Maybe the move isn't wholly surprising in a country of political uncertainty and jarring and startling contrasts and illuminations. Still, one reason it felt like such a jolt was because in the days before and after the commemorations of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, things had been relatively calm. (Though underline that word "relatively.") My time in Haiti was notable less for high drama than for more subtle moments.

VATICAN CITY -- In a first step toward establishing diplomatic relations, Pope Benedict XVI has named a 57-year-old Vatican diplomat to be a "non-resident pontifical representative" for Vietnam.

Italian Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli, currently Vatican nuncio to Indonesia, was reassigned Jan. 13 to serve as the pope's representative to Vietnam and simultaneously as nuncio in Singapore and apostolic delegate in Malaysia and Brunei (two countries that do not have diplomatic relations with the Vatican).

Girelli, who has been in the Vatican diplomatic corps since 1987, previously served at nunciatures in Cameroon, in New Zealand and in the United States, as well as in the Vatican Secretariat of State. He was ordained a bishop in 2006 when he was named nuncio to Indonesia.

A joint working group formed by the Vatican and Vietnam's communist government announced in June that the two sides were agreed that a papal representative would be named. A statement from the working group said that unlike a nuncio, the representative would not be residing in Vietnam for the time being.

WASHINGTON -- A bishop in northern Sudan said he believed the people of Southern Sudan were "marching toward the goal of what they expected, to be free in dignity and respect of rights," as a referendum on independence passed the halfway mark.

Auxiliary Bishop Daniel Adwok Kur of Khartoum wrote Jan. 12 from the town of Kosti in northern Sudan that the polls remained calm. At least two observers from the South reported that voting there was also going well.

Most observers expected the people of Southern Sudan to vote to separate from the rest of the country. Southern Sudanese in the country's North as well as those who fled to other countries, including the United States, were allowed to vote beginning Jan. 9.

However, Adwok said many people from Southern Sudan living in the North voted against independence, fearing they would face reprisal from the Islamic government in Khartoum if the South seceded. In many locales in the North, the bishop said, all or almost all registered voters had been to the polls by Jan. 12.