America’s 250th anniversary offers a moment for us to reflect on how the Catholic Church first took root in Ohio and how fragile those beginnings were. Few in number, the early Catholics of the Northwest Territory and frontier Ohio were scattered across forests, river towns, and isolated settlements, where priests …

When I first sat down to write this month’s column, I must admit I wasn’t especially inspired. Humility felt like a difficult theme to draw out of the archives. Then my colleague Sarah said something that really resonated with me. She spoke about the quiet beauty of recovering family histories, …