VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI has a new commandment for priests struggling to get their message across: Go forth and blog.

This is a great message for priests. Besides the struggle of making a good point in a 7 minute homily, many priests are brilliant and have a lot to offer with a little more of a forum for their knowledge. A blog is unlimited time and space to display their talent.

The Phaneuf deal aside; if you go back to when the Flames acquired Jokinen last March, Sutter has given up Jokinen, Brandon Prust, Jim Vandermeer, Lombardi and a first round pick for Higgins, “Ails” Kotalik and a third-rounder. If that’s the path to good health my advice is to walk it with a rosary.

Oftentimes Jim Kelley is full of hot air, but he occasionally nails it. This is good stuff.

DETROIT — Pitcher Justin Verlander and the Detroit Tigers have agreed to a US$80 million, five-year contract, a person familiar with the negotiations told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

More Verlander means more problems for the Twins. Hate to see him sign long-term in our division. Heck of a pitcher.

In short, this is a deal that smells ominously of panic.

Perhaps none of this might have come to pass had coach Brent Sutter been able to get more out of this talented Flames team. It was Brent, of course, who famously fled New Jersey this past offseason after failing to get a good Devils team out of the first round in two straight postseasons, claiming he wanted to spend more time with his family in Red Deer, Alberta.

Well, if you bought that line, you’d need to borrow a pair of old rubber boots from one of the Sutter farms. It came as no surprise to anyone that Brent moved swiftly to assume the head-coaching job that was made available when Darryl canned veteran bench boss Mike Keenan.

It’s about time that people started seeing that the real problem in Calgary is Darryl.

To make this a bit easier, we just launched the ability to send a single SMS message to multiple recipients. Just click on the SMS button at the top of your Google Voice inbox, enter names or numbers (separated by commas) in the “To” field, write your message and click send.

Google Voice keeps getting better and better. It’s especially great with an Android phone.

One of the reasons for bringing in Hagman (20 goals, 13 assists) and Stajan (16 goals, 25 assists) was to rejuvenate a slumbering Calgary offence.

There were no immediate returns with Calgary generating its second-lowest shot output of the season.

This is just hilarious stuff.

“Since everything and everyone in Catholic communion is truly inter-related, and the visible nexus of these relations is the bishop,” Cardinal George said, “an insistence on complete independence from the bishop renders a person or institution sectarian, less than fully Catholic. The purpose of our reflections, therefore, is to clarify questions of truth or faith and of accountability or community among all those who claim to be part of Catholic communion.”

It is so refreshing to see that the Bishops are re-establishing their authority regarding the schools in their jurisdiction. It is vitally important, in a world where many who call themselves “Catholic” are confused, that our leaders ensure that “Catholic” schools are truly teaching Catholicism and continuing to monitor the teachings, clarifications, and directives of the Holy See.

Sorry, Big Mac. You went from hitting 40-something homers to breaking the all-time single-season record. You’re going to have a hard time convincing us that it wasn’t the drugs.

NEW YORK — Mark McGwire finally came clean, admitting he used steroids when he broke baseball’s home run record in 1998, but he also said he didn’t need performance-enhancing drugs to hit the long ball.

You know, many players have done more despicable things than this, it’s disingenuous to put on a charade of completely coming clean only to withhold that the usage of these performance enhancing drugs didn’t play a role in what a person is most remembered for. I don’t care how much or how little they played a role, they definitely played a role. Even if all they did was help him to recover faster. The baseball season is a long one and part of why no one had done what he had done until his 70 home runs was because they didn’t have the endurance to maintain such a pace for an entire 162 game season.

To me, this apology is almost makes it worse. I like McGwire as a person, but he might have been a mediocre major leaguer had it not been for the PEDs.