The snatching of a small child from its loving parents is an unfathomable act of evil, which is why the world has been so moved by the plight of the McCann family these last four weeks - moved also by their dignity and faith, and by their utter determination to restore their four-year-old daughter Madeleine to their arms. Any minute their search could end in the joy of her recovery or the grief of finding her dead - and the third possibility, almost unimaginable, that they will never know what happened to her, their cruel loss reawakened every day of their lives. Yet Kate and Gerry McCann say again and again how grateful they are for the outpouring of prayerful compassion that has come their way, and how the experience has strengthened their faith in human nature and in God. If any couple ever had an excuse to be bitter, it was they.

The McCanns met Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday, an audience facilitated by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster and by the British Ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Campbell. Both in Britain and in Portugal, where the abduction took place, Church and State have been straining every sinew for them. The McCanns made a calculated decision to seek the highest possible media profile in the search for Madeleine, once they realised that Portuguese detectives were inhibited by Portuguese law - and hampered perhaps by the fact that child abduction is a rare crime in their country - from making the sort of public appeal that a British police force would have quickly resorted to. But it is not an easy choice. The constant spotlight on the case could conceivably be deterring whoever holds the child from returning her.

What the McCanns are implicitly saying, however, is enormously important - that this child's life is, quite literally, infinitely precious. No amount of effort to recover her safe and well would be too much. This itself is an act of faith, for Madeleine's value as a person comes from God, not from any sentimental reckoning ...

The very limited progress made by the American troop surge in Iraq means President Bush is fast running out of options. Under pressure in Congress and from public opinion to withdraw, he instead sent in reinforcements, following advice from his army commanders that lack of troops on the ground was the reason that parts of central Iraq, including areas of Baghdad, were slipping out of anybody's control ...

What might be termed the Age of the Military Dictatorship in Latin America is now largely in the past, and the Catholic Church has had to adapt to a new political reality. Instead of a series of right-wing juntas who looked for support from old-fashioned church traditionalists, from rich landowners and from the US, the continental centre of gravity is now left-of-centre. Marxism is not the American bogeyman it was, ...

Brazil presents a range of hard challenges to the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, whose response may determine the Church's future in the world's largest Catholic nation. Indeed, whether it stays Catholic at all cannot be taken for granted. The spirit of post-modernist relativism and secularism, which has already undermined the Church's place in Europe, is only one of a number of threats, though in the ...