Back to the Thunderdome

So, gang, with the Christmas Season now at its end and the Vatican's policy year set to launch in the morning, your pages will be back tomorrow.

However you spent 'em, hope your holidays were sweet and peaceful and your New Year's off to a great start. For a quick preview of what's just ahead, a check of the pipeline (Popeline?) turns up, among other things, a look at what the new chief of the global church's million-plus professed brings to the post, the latest from the President's Desk, a taste of folk piety (with some more number-crunching mixed in), the curtain-raiser to the Stateside bench's most anticipated (or, in some quarters, dreaded) moment of the last near-decade...

...and, atop it all this week, the much-awaited fruition of what'll likely end up being one of 2011's dominant storylines on the beat: the establishment of the first ordinariate for groups of Anglicans (read: Anglicanorum coetibus) entering communion with Rome, which the Holy See is expected to erect for the English church this week, prior to Thursday's ordination of the three former "flying bishops" of the Church of England to the Catholic diaconate. (The trio will be advanced to the priesthood on Saturday, all of two weeks after they were received into the fold during a low-key Mass on New Year's Day in Westminster Cathedral.)

As ever, a pretty threadbare plate. Before jumping back into it, though, a quick word of thanks to this readership for your patience and goodness always, but especially over the breather of these last couple weeks.

See, such is the work that this scribe's life tends to be a parade of "one more things" -- one more post, one more e.mail, one more call or read-around of the wires before leaving the desk. No question, it's a blessing to have a gig where that's always a joy to take on... but at the same time, that can easily give short shrift to some of life's best and most needed blessings.

Along these lines, experience offers innumerable examples of how many of those among us who're in ministry (and give all of yourselves to it) know this temptation well, and can succumb to it more than most of our minds can fathom. So, bottom line: to whoever among us that applies (and you know who you are), remember well that -- especially in this challenging days -- we need you around for a long time, so please always remember to be good to yourselves, and over the last couple weeks, here's hoping you got to do just that.

To one and all, one last wish for a Blessed Christmas and New Year... and as ever, here goes nothin'.

PHOTO: Reuters

-30-