Touching lives with compassion and God’s presence is what Genny and Chubby Marks and other extraordinary ministers of holy Communion do during weekly visits with the homebound in St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Metairie.

“There she is,” Genny Marks said with a smile as she approached her old friend Rita LeBlanc one recent day to give her Communion. “How are you doing today?”

“I’m doing good,” said Le­Blanc, a mother of four grown adults, as she clutched a pink rosary in her hand.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Genny Marks said as she affectionately kissed her hello.

Excitement is mounting in the local faith community – and not just among Catholics – about the impending Blessed John Paul II Exhibit “I Have Come to You Again” scheduled to stop in New Orleans Feb. 4-May 11, 2013, at Notre Dame Seminary’s Schulte Hall.

 More than 100 personal artifacts of Blessed John Paul II – stored in the Vatican Collections in Rome and the Pope John Paul II Center in Krakow, Poland – were procured for the exhibit. Father Malcolm Neyland, the executive director of the National Exhibits Association, is coordinating the exhibit.

Bowling shoes once worn by Tom Cruise cling to a wall high above the entrance corridor inside Mid-City Lanes, just left of the alley’s blue-lit statue of the Blessed Mother.

For the 14th year, members of the Archdiocesan Sidewalk Counseling and Prayer Ministry and approximately 275 others met May 12 outside a Metairie clinic known for performing abortions and prayed 20 decades of the rosary in the annual Mother’s Day Crusade for Life.