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The Deacon's Bench

“Jesus is the king, not me.” — Elvis Presley, to fans at a concert, according to this report.

We’ve had a few too many versions of “The Ten Commandments” for my taste — including the Dreamworks animated version, “Prince of Egypt,” and a low-rent TV adaptation a couple years ago — but that hasn’t stopped another Hollywood studio from attempting to retell it again, this time with 3D animation (a la “Shrek”). There…

Countless Catholics are familiar with CYO, the Catholic Youth Organization sports program that has flourished for decades around the country. Now there is an effort to underline the “C” part of “CYO,” and emphasize the spirituality of sports, as the Los Angeles diocesan paper, The Tidings reports: Catholic Youth Organization of Los Angeles, which provides…

If you don’t recognize what’s happening in the picture on the left, you aren’t alone. Catholic education isn’t what it used to be. But with so many Catholic schools struggling — and fighting to stay open — an experiment in Boston caught my attention, courtesy this piece in the Boston Globe: The Rev. James Flavin…

Over at her self-named website, popular novelist Anne Rice (“Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt,” amnong others) has posted her own political manifesto. Rice has undergone quite a conversion (as she described in her last book, and in many interviews since) and has reportedly embraced Catholicism. But you might not know that from her statement,…

From the Netherlands comes this story of a priest who likes to give his villagers an early wake-up call: A Dutch priest has been fined 5,000 euros ($6,800) for ringing his church bells too loudly in the morning. The Catholic priest began ringing the bells at just after seven in the morning soon after arriving…

Friday night, The Disney Channel debuted the sequel to “High School Musical,” aptly called “High School Musical 2.” If you live with, or near, anyone between the ages of 8 and 13, you know that this is one of the monumental events of the 21st century. The first “High School Musical” cost four million dollars…

You never know where a vocation will come from. And this item from an Indianapolis newspaper tells of one vocation that took root and grew at an Ivy League school: Christopher Roberts was seemingly on track. Taking classes at Harvard University, he was on his way to a career as a lawyer — until God…

We’ve known for a long time that monastic retreats are good for the soul — and the head. Now Protestants are getting in on the act, and a new industry is beginning to boom in, of all places, Germany — where they’re offering retreats for harried business executives, in monastaries: Bursfelde is one of 33…

Surely some Irish eyes were smiling in Wisconsin today, when the Prime of Ireland popped by a local Irish Fest to offer some encouraging words on how the faith is doing back on the Emerald Isle: Archbishop Sean Brady of Armagh, the Primate of All Ireland, told an American audience that although the Catholic Church…
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