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The Deacon's Bench

From the op-ed page of the New York Times comes a personal critique of the Latin rite mass that is, unsurprisingly, not exactly a rave: In his homily, the pastor, the Rev. C. Frank Phillips, spoke proudly about the Latin Mass, which his parish was the first in Chicago to revive. He announced that it…

While a lot of attention has been focused on Ave Maria, the shiny new Catholic-centric town in Florida, less attention has been focused on the university sprouting up around it. This, too, is the brainchild of zillionaire and pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan. Now a newspaper in Kansas gives us a peek: Rising 10 stories from…

Fed up with all the schlock coming out of Hollywood? Hit your knees. That, at least, seems to be the message of a new ministry that’s cropped up in California, started by a woman who has produced documentaries for NBC: While most of us shake our heads, snicker or secretly gloat over celebrity scandal and…

In my parish, we’ve just begun a novena to St. John Vianney, the patron of parish priests. It is one way to offer a prayer for vocations, and to raise awareness. In North Carolina, the local paper has a great vocation story — and it’s also a conversion story, about a young man named Michael…

When I was four or five years old, my mother took me Wheaton Plaza Shopping Center, in Wheaton, Maryland, to see Santa Claus. Any four-year old will tell you: this is a very big deal. And it was even more so for me, because I wanted a new two-wheel bike, with monkey bars and a…

A very bemused tip of the hat to David Morrison at Sed Contra for sending this my way. Cute. And thought-provoking. How do you define “Christian”? Click to watch.

For decades, The Christophers have proudly and optimistically proclaimed that “it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” They’ve shed that light, most famously, on television, with the long-running program, “Christopher Closeup.” Now, after six decades, it’s going off the air this Sunday. The press release follows: Long before televised mega-concerts…

The Bunny Hop is so last century. What wedding is complete these days without everyone doing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”? This routine below has been floating around the ‘net for several months. It’s a scream. Really. For a more recent variation, try the version below, with a thousand Filipino prisoners doing the same thing.

No sooner had I finished reading this piece in my diocesan newspaper, describing the orientation and training for visiting priests from Africa and Asia for the summer (including “accent reduction classes”), than I stumbled on this very good editorial via Catholic Onine. It comes to us from Our Sunday Visitor and reads, in part: Material…

Just weeks after Santa Barbara ordained an astonishing 60 deacons, now a splinter group has decided that’s not quite good enough: it’s “ordained” a batch of women as deacons, and one as a priest. The details are sketchy, which is what makes the whole exercise so bizarre: Sunday’s ordination, witnessed by more than 100 invited…
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