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The Deacon's Bench

…well, maybe not.  But still.  This ain’t exactly my cuppa.  From the New York Times: Goad Sibayan went prospecting recently in the remote Philippine highlands here known as the Cordillera. He clambered up and then down a narrow, rocky footpath that snaked around some hills, paying no heed to coffins that, in keeping with a…

“Why this trip to Malta? There are many reasons. First, St. Paul. The Pauline Year for the universal church has ended, but Malta is celebrating 1,950 years since the shipwreck, and this occasion once presents us with the figure of the Apostle to the Gentiles and his message which is still authentic and important for…

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It “consents,” so to speak, to God’s creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree…

A judge ruled on Thursday that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional — but President Obama plans to mark the occasion anyway. From CBS News: “It goes beyond mere ‘acknowledgment’ of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function…

That’s what a bishop in Mexico is doing. He blames pornography, sex education and erotic TV progams for the sex abuse scandal. From SKY news: A Roman Catholic bishop in Mexico has sparked outrage by suggesting eroticism on television and internet pornography were to blame for child sex abuse by priests. He also claimed sex…

A comment at this thread, I think, deserves a wider airing.   (I’m closing off comments here, because I think this speaks for itself.) A reader writes: Just reading this comment thread makes me feel ill to my stomach. I was not raised Catholic but my whole life I felt a deep attraction and pull towards…

This week, in her Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan looks at all the men crowding the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and says, in effect, “Enough”: Once, leaders of the Vatican felt that silence would protect the church. But now anyone who cares about it must come to understand that only speaking, revealing, admitting…

One of the most controversial priests in Chicago — or in the country, for that matter — has apologized for remarks he made in last Sunday’s homily: Rev. Michael Pfleger — the South Side priest who has often found himself at odds with the Catholic church hierarchy — has issued a written apology after saying…

“Our jobs are not to judge, not to finger-point, not to consign each other to flames of woe over what we understand of God’s mind, but to simply love each other, as created creatures, all doing the best we can in a broken world, and remember that God’s mind is not ours, and we can…

The pontiff was apparently making a reference to the sex abuse scandal now rocking the Church: Pope Benedict said on Thursday the sexual abuse scandal shaking Roman Catholicism showed the Church needed to do penance for its sins, in a rare public reference by the pope to pedophilia in the priesthood. “Now, under attack from…
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