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The Deacon's Bench

Andrew Sullivan just lobbed this grenade into the blogosphere: A priest is discovered to have been actively molesting children. His superior is notified in 1980. One of the things he is told of is the priest’s forcing an 11 year old boy to perform oral sex on him. The superior does not contact the police.…

Some surprising news about what folks believe about Easter: While most Americans describe Easter as a religious holiday, less than half of U.S. adults surveyed link it specifically to the Resurrection of Jesus, a Barna Group study shows. Seven in 10 respondents mentioned religion or spirituality in their response to an open-ended question about how…

Latino immigrants are having a powerful impact on the American Catholic Church — but a new study raises questions about whether that impact will last: New arrivals from Spanish-speaking countries have helped the Catholic Church maintain its status as the dominant religion in the U.S., according to a new Trinity College report slated to be…

“Two basic principles…continue to shape the concerns of the Catholic bishops: health care means taking care of the health needs of all, across the human life span; and the expansion of health care should not involve the expansion of abortion funding and of polices forcing everyone to pay for abortions. Because these principles have not…

Nashville has an impressively large number of people about to join the Church this Easter — and the local secular press is even taking notice: When she was growing up, Lori W. Caste decided not to get baptized. Her father was a lapsed Baptist, her mother a Jehovah’s Witness. She followed her mother to Sunday…

It’s been floating around for a couple of years in various forms, and popping up at private screenings and film festivals, but now it appears “The Human Experience” will finally arrive in movie theaters next month. I had the chance to see it a few months back at a screening in Brooklyn. The documentary, from…

Headline in The New York Times: Survey: Readers Don’t Want to Pay for News Online

There’s some evidence of that: There is an increasing move away from the death penalty, according to participants in a recent congress. From Feb. 24-26, campaigners against the death penalty met at the World Congress Against the Death Penalty, in Geneva, Switzerland. “There is a new trend against the death penalty that is something new…

Rome is using this day of rest to stir a debate that never seems to rest: The Vatican on Sunday denied that its celibacy requirement for priests was the root cause of the clerical sex abuse scandal convulsing the church in Europe and again defended the pope’s handling of the crisis. Suggestions that the celibacy…

This Sunday afforded our choir an opportunity to sing one of my favorite modern hymns: “Out of Darkness” by Christopher Walker. (I chose it for my Mass of Thanksgiving, too, and we’ll hear it a couple of times during Holy Week.) It turns out to be a particular favorite at ordinations,  and I found the…
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