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The Deacon's Bench

Just back from vacation, I was startled to see the new subway and bus posters for Ben Affleck’s new movie about bank robbers, “The Town.” Do they really think this will make people want to see the movie?

Summer may be drawing to a close, but that doesn’t mean surfing season is over. Just ask the sisters who are stoked for some gnarly waves off the coast of New Jersey: Surf’s up, Sister! Sister James Dolores, 73, gives her best surfer-girl pose in Stone Harbor, NJ, where her Pennsylvania convent owns a beachfront…

A priest friend in Ireland alerted me to this — and it’s worth reading and praying over, for it reveals a side of the priesthood many of us never hear about. From the Irish Times: The Italian alpine village of Villaretto was drowsing under its blanket of snow when, on January 26th, 1985, the parish…

I just got home from two weeks in Ocean Pines, Maryland, about five miles from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a pretty neighborhood of cottages and boat docks and tall pines, where the most popular pastime among the natives appears to be dog-walking.  (During my visit, I also discovered two magical words: Harris Teeter.  More on…

The businessman who is backing the Islamic center near Ground Zero is real estate developer Sharif El-Gama. Did you know his mother was Catholic? He sat down for an interview recently with Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes: Pelley: Who are you? El-Gamal: I’m an American, a New Yorker, born in Methodist Hospital Brooklyn, to a…

A parish in Knoxville, Tennessee had a big outdoor mass last weekend and the local media came to check it out. Video below. Story and more video here. And this blog has more pictures and video, too.

Pope Benedict will be wading into some choppy waters next month when he visits the UK. And The Guardian — printing an excerpt from The British Journalism Review — wonders if the pontiff’s media team is up to the challenge: The attitude of the British government may be one of welcome, but hostility does not…

“Sorry, but the Church does not exist to affirm us in our ideological preferences. It exists to teach us (among other things) and challenge us with the truth of the gospel. Our posture is to be one of docility to the voice of the Magisterium, not to be blogospheric popinjays who glance at the teaching,…

“It’s hard to ignore the fact that Jesus chose to be born poor; he worked as what many scholars now say was not simply a carpenter, but what might be called a day laborer; he spent his days and nights with the poor; he and his disciples lived with few if any possessions; he advocated…

A college football star’s extraordinary recovery from cancer may, in fact, have had some divine help. Details, from the New York Daily News: One evening last winter, John Acampora, owner of the Flat Breads Café across the street from Boston College’s front gate, mailed a small bottle of Holy Water to Mark Herzlich, a senior…
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