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Mel Gibson as Thomas Craven and Shawn Roberts as Burnham in “The Edge of Darkness” (Warner Bros.)

Director Martin Campbell’s new film, “The Edge of Darkness,” is a blessing of sorts for Academy Award-winning director/writer/actor Mel Gibson. In this tense conspiracy thriller, Gibson plays Thomas Craven, a Boston police detective. On a rainy night, he welcomes his daughter home from her secretive job. Once home, Emma (Bojana Novakovic) wants to tell her father something but as they step out into the night she is blasted away by a powerful rifle before she can do so.

The Boston cops think that Thomas was the target but he turns small signs into clues and is soon carrying out his own investigation. With nothing to lose now that his daughter is dead, he vows to get the killer or killers who took away his only child.

For the past year an informal group of students at The Catholic University of America has been organizing to support gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students and faculty. Named CUAllies, the group has been met with some opposition. While the students claim the group is only a support system for minorities on campus, the university has withheld official support in fear of endorsing an organization that might advocate for issues contrary to official Catholic teaching. Spokesman Victor Nakas stated the university’s opposition in a Dec. 11 article in The Washington Post. He explained that students already have access to support services through the university’s health center, counseling services, and office of campus ministry.

Catholic University student Lauren Crook, who cofounded the organization and is in her final year as a sociology student, spoke with NCR editorial intern Joshua McElwee about the group and its vision. What follows is an edited version of that interview.

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NCR: Why did you form CUAllies?

John J. McLaughlin

It has taken years for award-winning author John J. McLaughlin, 37, to grow into being a storyteller, a calling he practices “in the service of the poor.” Having the “gift of languages,” McLaughlin said in a phone interview from his Seattle home, means being a “cultural translator,” someone who is able to explain the depth and context of people’s lives.

In that sense, McLaughlin is a distinctly Catholic writer. His rich use of imaginative detail is incarnational, grounding his characters in specificity and reality. More broadly, he values the importance the Catholic tradition places “on symbol, ritual, and story, to learn to see the world in terms of both metaphor and narrative.”

An embryologist removes frozen embryos from a storage tank in this 2007 file photo. (CNS)

ST. LOUIS -- "Be fruitful," God instructed Adam and Eve, "and multiply."

They were the first words God spoke to his creation, and his creation has heeded them ever since. But over the years, God's creation has become sophisticated enough to rewrite the original rules of being fruitful, and most of the new rules don't sit well with leaders of the Catholic church.

There is "great confusion among lay Catholics regarding the church's teaching on human reproductive technologies," Philadelphia's Cardinal Justin Rigali said at the U.S. bishops' meeting in Baltimore last November. "There is a need to help Catholics understand specific differences between the Catholic understanding and a secular understanding of human life."

When Rigali was archbishop of St. Louis, he celebrated a Mass for infertile couples, as did the current archbishop, Robert Carlson, on Tuesday (Feb. 16) night.

By celebrating a Mass for infertile Catholics, Carlson walked a pastoral high-wire act that has becoming increasingly familiar to church leaders.