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The Deacon's Bench

And now, a little head-scratcher for a Monday morning.  A leading scholar claims that a botched translation has been misleading us for thousands of years: Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a…

What can you do when a parish closes and the church is all-but-abandoned? Some novel solutions, in Albany: Old church buildings never die. They’re just revived for other purposes, be it a new house of worship or an artists space. That was the case Sunday as two formerly unused Catholic churches found new life: one…

A friend sent this along, and I can’t help but think that a saint whom we recently celebrated —  Francis of Assisi — would approve.  Meet Jessica, the hippo who’s also a family pet:

Just when you thought you’d seen it all…along comes this: A South Carolina priest made headlines this week when he starred in a new poker competition on US television this week. Father Andrew Trapp, an assistant pastor at Garden City Beach’s St. Michael Catholic Church, has so far won $25,000 in Fox TV’s Million Dollar…

With a tapestry of the new saint fluttering outside St. Peter’s Basilica, thousands crowded inside the church to watch Hawaii’s most beloved citizen become a saint:  Pope Benedict XVI elevated Father Damien of Moloka’i to sainthood today, 120 years after his death from Hansen’s disease in the Kalaupapa settlement. At 10:30 a.m., the pope read…

Could Mother Teresa soon be on the move?   From the AP:  Albania wants the remains of Nobel Peace laureate Mother Teresa and the only post-independence monarch to be returned to the country, the prime minister said Friday. Mother Teresa’s remains are in India and King Ahmet Zog’s in France. Prime Minister Sali Berisha’s government…

Here’s something you don’t see every day — a New York Times editorial about a Catholic saint: Damien de Veuster was a young missionary from the 19th-century Belgian countryside when he went to work at the leprosy settlement in Kalaupapa, a remote peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Yet his approach was strikingly modern.…

Some interesting news from the Pacific, as Hawaii prepares to celebrate its first saint:  The Catholic parish in Kaunakakai will be renamed St. Damien Church as soon as Pope Benedict XVI declares the sainthood of the missionary to Molokai. Signs were erected days ago, covered with canvas, awaiting the moment. The unveiling will be a…

It’s nice to see this new ministry in a diocese getting some attention. But the errors contained in this article about deacons are really pretty embarrassing.

A few weeks ago, a remarkable story popped up, about fashion photographer Michael Belk.  His work has appeared in Vogue and GQ, but after many years of success, he felt compelled to do something more meaningful.  Belk is a devout Christian, who had been deeply affected by the events of 9/11. He decided to embark on an…
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