The Deacon's Bench
The scene this morning at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Read more
The scene this morning at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Read more
The good people at Legatus Magazine invited me to write a few words about fasting for Lent. Check ’em out: I was doing perfectly fine, sitting at the diner, scanning the menu and steadfastly determined to have a tuna melt for lunch … until someone at the table next to me made a fateful decision. They ordered a cheeseburger. It was all downhill from there. It arrived at the table, oozing melted cheese, heaped with French fries, the air fragrant... Read more
With Deacon Bill McNamara, my classmate and the DRE at my parish. Read more
From Vatican Radio: Less than two weeks shy of one year on from his election as bishop of Rome, Pope Francis describes himself as, “A man who laughs, cries, sleeps well and has friends like everyone else.” It is the self-description the Holy Father offered to the editor-in-chief of the Italian daily, Corriere della sera, Ferruccio De Bortoli, in an interview appearing in the paper’s Wednesday, March 5th edition. The Pope’s wide-ranging conversation with the veteran journalist covers themes from bioethics, to... Read more
From CNS: U.S. Catholics stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine as their country struggles with political tensions, said a statement from the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., said in the March 4 statement that the U.S. bishops, “together with tens of millions of U.S. Catholics of Eastern European descent join Pope Francis in solidarity and prayers for the people of Ukraine for an end to the current tensions... Read more
From USA TODAY: An honor student and athlete who claims her parents threw her out of their home when she turned 18 has taken the highly unusual step of suing them for immediate financial support and to force them to pay for her college education. Rachel Canning, a cheerleader and lacrosse player at Morris Catholic High School who has aspirations to be a biomedical engineer, filed a lawsuit last week in the Family Part of state Superior Court in Morristown that seeks... Read more
The other day, I read an interview with a woman in Lebanon, Sister Micheline Lattouf. Sister Micheline belongs to the Good Shepherd Sisters. Her flock consists of men, women and children who are—literally—running for their lives. They are refugees. Most of them are Muslim. Many are from Syria. By one account, over 2.2 million people have been displaced by the war in Syria. About half of those are children. Many have fled to Lebanon, where the country is struggling to... Read more
Get a load of this: An article on Jan. 20, 1853, recounting the story of Solomon Northup, whose memoir “12 Years a Slave” became a movie 160 years later that won the best picture Oscar at the 86th Academy Awards on Sunday night, misspelled his surname as Northrop. And the headline misspelled it as Northrup. The errors came to light on Monday after a Twitter user pointed out the article in The Times archives. (The errors notwithstanding, The Times described the article... Read more
An alert reader found this news online: Chick-Fil-A is introducing a fish sandwich for Lent. That sent me scurrying to find this interesting fast food footnote for you, on this Fat Tuesday, from Smithsonian Magazine. It relates how the owner of a McDonald’s franchise in Ohio faced a daunting challenge back in 1959: Though Lou Groen’s restaurant was one of 68 new franchises opened that year by founder Ray Kroc, there was something about Monfort Heights, Ohio, that didn’t bode... Read more
Behold: You know that whole, “refusing to serve someone because they think differently than you is all Jim Crow-y and immoral?” Yeah, well…so much for that. A gay stylist in Santa Fe refused to cut New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez’s hair due to her stance on same-sex marriage. KOB-TV’s Stuart Dyson reports. A Santa Fe hairdresser is waging his own boycott of sorts: He is denying service to the governor of New Mexico because she opposes gay marriage. Antonio Darden, who... Read more
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