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The Deacon's Bench

The Church’s recent document Dignitas Personae is posing a lot of challenges to some people — including the couple profiled in this story by CNS: As committed Catholics, Timothy and Dawn Smith respect Vatican pronouncements, but recent statements about frozen embryo adoption from church officials have bewildered the Fitzwilliam, N.H., parents of three children who…

About a century ago, the Jesuit poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem that begins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” It’s a beautiful statement of the miraculous – and it’s more surprising because Hopkins himself suffered from depression. His life was a struggle, full of difficulties and disappointments. It…

A friend sent me this link to a fascinating story about a small group of Vietnamese Trappist monks who have made themselves a home in the California desert: Long before dawn in the remote desert south of Barstow, the only light for miles around is a faint glow from a triple-wide trailer. Inside, several monks…

In the mail today, I got a membership card for this. I’m going to go lie down.

This happens so rarely, you can’t help but sit up and take notice. A government official in Australia was denied communion on Christmas Eve. And, it seems, it was all a big mistake. From the local press: Attorney-General Rob Hulls was refused communion in a Catholic church over the State Government’s Bill to legalise abortion.…

“My call to religious life, like that of many others, did not come in isolation. It arose as one among several good opportunities from which I could choose. I was not grasping at this choice as a last chance because there was nothing else to do. God provided a rich array of invitations and allowed…

If anyone missed it, here’s Dave Barry’s typically brilliant year-in-review. The good news: it’s a riot. The bad news: we have to wait another year for the next one.

My mother used to love to tell this story: It was New Year’s Eve, 1948. The snow was falling, the wind was howling. And the man who would be my father showed up at her doorstep with a huge box in his arms, wrapped in colorful Christmas paper. What was this? A present? A week…

The New York Times concludes its series on foreign priests in America by traveling to the other side of the world, India. In Tuesday’s installment, we find that one of the world’s leading exporters of priests is having second thoughts: In the sticky night air, next to a grove of mahogany trees, nearly 50 young…

Well, this made me put down my coffee cup and go “Wow.” A father, a son, a conversion, and more. From the Times of London: In what is believed to be a first, a father and son, both former Anglican clergy, have been ordained as Catholic priests and are now working for the same archdiocese,…
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