By TERRY MATTINGLY, Scripps Howard News Service

It doesn't take a doctorate in church architecture to know why every pew in every Catholic cathedral allows worshippers to gaze toward the altar.

What happens on the altar during Mass is the heart of Catholic faith.

Every now and then, bishops write letters for their priests to read to the faithful during Mass.

In 1996, the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services sent a letter to its chaplains instructing them to urge their flocks to back the "Project Life Postcard Campaign" in support of the Partial-Birth-Abortion Ban Act.

For more than a decade, Pentecostal Bishop T.D. Jakes has lived in the shadow of a Time magazine cover that asked, "Is this man the next Billy Graham?"

That was a loaded question, because of tensions behind the scenes between the multimedia Dallas superstar and many mainstream Christian leaders.

Pope Benedict XVI cut to the chase when meeting with the visiting bishops from Washington, D.C., Baltimore and the U.S. armed services.

The pope mentioned "religious freedom" in the third sentence of his Jan. 19 remarks at the Vatican and he never let up -- returning to this hot topic again and again.

Moments after the New England Patriots smashed his Denver Broncos in the playoffs, Tim Tebow stood before a wall of reporters and said exactly what anyone who has been paying attention already knew he was going to say.

The Patriots, he stressed, "came out and they played well and they executed well and you've got to give them a lot of credit."

In the fall of 1979, a cluster of Episcopalians made another trip to Rome seeking a haven for Anglo-Catholic believers anxious to exit their increasingly divided church.

In terms of giant headlines and spilled ink, there is no question that the lightning strike by U.S. special forces that killed Osama bin Laden was the year's most spectacular news event featuring a deadly brew of religion, politics and violence.

For those who follow Christian traditions, Christmas begins when the darkness of Christmas Eve yields to bright midnight candles and the Mass of the Angels or the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The Christmas season then lasts 12 days, ending with Epiphany on Jan. 6.

Journalists have been known to jump to premature conclusions if a denomination has the word "Southern" in its name.

At first, there didn't seem to be much an 80-something grandmother could do to help her church's college freshmen wrestle with the trials and temptations of their first weeks away at college.

After all, she knew very little about Facebook, YouTube, online homework, smartphones or texting, let alone "sexting."