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The Deacon's Bench

News broke over the weekend that the Jesuits will be coughing up some $50 million to more than 100 Alaskans who say they were sexually abused by members of the order. The payout is huge — not just financially, but historically, according to the AP: The settlement with the Oregon Province of the Society of…

November 19 marks my six-month anniversary as a deacon. I still can’t believe it. Anyway: I had asked a friend if she would sing Bernstein’s “A Simple Song” at my Mass of Thanksgiving the day after my ordination. She was happy to oblige — but had to go to an out-of-town wedding that weekend. So…

The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Tenety has posted a terrific interview this weekend with a Catholic veteran of Iraq who is now a student at Georgetown. As Tenety describes him: “William James Quinn was 24 and a veteran of the Iraq war when he began his freshman year of college. While in Iraq, he worked as…

The Boston Globe went searching for some reaction, anything, to Cardinal O’Malley’s slap the other day at pro-abortion Democrats. They didn’t find much. The silence, perhaps, was telling: In 1935, Governor James Michael Curley was pushing hard for a bill to create a state lottery. The bill looked like it would sail through the Legislature.…

You can never tell where a vocation will come from, and in Florida Catholic this week there’s a stirring story of a young boy whose life was shaped by one memory of an uncle who was a military chaplain during World War II: If anything will make an impression on a young lad growing up…

Relatives of cyclone victims wail in Barishal, 75 miles south of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, Friday, Nov. 16, 2007. Photo by: Pavel Rahman, AP

If it seems like the holiday season is starting earlier this year, there’s a good reason. It is. The earliest you can have Thanksgiving is November 21st, and this year, it’s on the 22nd. And, as a result, everybody got a jump on it. This year, Halloween decorations were up in the stores when they…

A high-profile member of the USCCB was running for a committee office this week — and lost. And now some are wondering if there was a message in that, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: This week, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke lost an election for the chairmanship of the U.S. bishops’ canon law committee…

More and more, your keyboard is becoming a critical evangelization tool. Don’t believe it? Check out this pretty compelling bit of evidence from The Leaven, the diocesan newspaper of Kansas City, Kansas: When Jesus told his disciples to go out and preach the good news, he likely did not have a keyboard, computer screen and…

I get asked that question a lot. Below is the best answer I can provide. This has been making its way around the world on the web, and has caused quite a sensation here in Gotham, where New York magazine and the New York Daily News have been yucking it up about it. Even Drudge…
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