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The Deacon's Bench

Even as the world celebrates the feast of one of France’s greatest saints, the country known as the church’s “eldest daughter” is roiled in an embarassing diplomatic mess. From a French news service: France has settled on an envoy to represent Paris at the Vatican after the Holy See rejected a gay candidate, a French…

“Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that the Church being a body composed of different members, the most essential, the most noble of all the organs would not be wanting to her; I understood that the Church has a heart and that this heart is burning with love; that it is…

What could be more timely than this story of a financial broker who found life on Wall Street spiritually empty — and became, instead, an Orthodox Christian monk? Reuters has the tale: Brother Nikanor, a Nasdaq broker turned monk, advises former colleagues to put a jar with soil on their desks to remind them where…

That phrase from Psalm 8 popped into my mind as I started to read this item. This story from the National Catholic Register fixes its gaze on the heavens — and on a side of Catholicism we rarely read about: Catholics in space. Take a look: Oct. 1, 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration…

The ridiculously funny and smart P.J. O’Rourke has just been diagnosed with a treatable form of cancer, and has penned an honest but irreverent essay about it, including some thoughts on what he’s praying for: I can’t be the only person who feels like a jerk saying, “Please cure me, God. I’m underinsured. I have…

If you want to know what Pope Benedict was like as a little boy, just ask his brother. So, someone did. And a rare and revealing interview with the other Ratzinger priest has now been published: In an interview by Andrea Tornielli for the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, Pope Benedict XVI’s brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger,…

Here’s something to get the wheels turning. Take a gander at this provocative post by Rod Dreher, pondering these words by Saul Alinsky, a radical who had a profound effect on Barack Obama: Each year, for a number of years, the activists in the graduating class from a major Catholic seminary near Chicago would visit…

This piece in NCR about Catholic blogs was pretty interesting, until I started counting the embarrassing mistakes. (Memo to Amy Welborn: call your lawyer). But James Martin sums up the Catholic blogosphere succinctly: “At their best, Catholic blogs serve the same function as do the entry halls that are part of new church buildings in…

With the world economy on the brink of calamity, if not collapse, here’s an idea. It comes to us from Austin Ivereigh at the blog of America magazine, In All Things: The task: to recover the connection between money and material reality, to restore the human dimension to financial transactions, to underpin borrowing with the…

…or at least, its legendary former President, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh. The Wall Street Journal sat down for a chat with this 91-year-old icon recently. A snip: WSJ: In your day, the Church produced figures such as Bishop Sheen and Father Drinan and Pope John XXIII. Who are the Catholic leaders today of their caliber? Are…
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