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The Deacon's Bench

If you thought she was just a shrewd businesswoman with a knack for kneading dough, you might be surprised at the real story behind “Auntie Anne” and her blockbuster pretzel business. The Washington Post has the details: Her name is as familiar and cozy as the hot pretzels and cold lemonade she used to sell.…

It used to be the Maytag repairman had the loneliest job on earth. Now, according to this report from Connecticut, he may have some competition: The rectory is very peaceful — a little too peaceful, if the Rev. Joseph Looney is being honest about it. Looney has been stationed at the Church of the Nativity…

Those clever people in Britain have devised a new way to encourage vocations: priestly pin-ups. Or, more accurately, clerical calendars: Twelve Catholic priests have swapped their pulpits for favourite pastimes in a calendar designed to try to recruit young men to the priesthood. The priests, from the Diocese of Leeds, are pictured in an array…

One of my annual pleasures, on the last Sunday of the year, is sitting down and laughing until my sides hurt from reading Dave Barry’s annual round-up of the year-in-review. If anyone missed it this year, it’s at the link. Here’s a choice nugget, from his preamble: It was a year that strode boldly into…

We continue to live in an age of martyrdom. That much seems clear from this succinct report by CWN: At least 21 Catholic priests, deacons, religious, and seminarians died for the faith in 2007, the Fides news service reports. Each year Fides, an arm of the Congregation for Evangelization, compiles a full list of the…

…I’d fit right in at the Vatican’s nativity scene. A couple weeks ago, I posted an item about the nativity scene going up in St. Peter’s Square, and noted that it would be very different, because it would be set not in a stable or a cave, but in Joseph’s carpentry workshop in Nazareth. I…

Years ago, my wife and I decided, just once, to spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square. We weren’t brave enough to stand outside in the cold with noisemakers and funny hats. Instead, we got a package at the Marriott, and had dinner in a ballroom overlooking the square, and at midnight, the whole place…

How does someone who believes in nothing come to believe in God? Down in Virginia, the Arlington Herald recently published the remarkable story of how a young woman who had turned her back on God found her way to the Catholic Church — and became a catechist, to boot: Her parents are both ordained ministers…

After months of waiting and wondering, last night I finally got to see the movie version of “Sweeney Todd.” I’d seen the stage production years ago, with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn, and knew to expect something different with Johnny Depp wielding the razor. It is different. Very different. It’s a brooding, disturbing, urgent, ominous,…

They are beautifully crafted, exquisitely designed — and people are dying to have them. They are Trappist caskets. And according to this item from CNS, business is booming: For the craftsmen and artisans at New Melleray Abbey in Peosta, a relatively new ministry has expanded into a new state-of-the-art, 40,000-square-foot factory, almost five times larger…
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