Deacon Anthony Cullen

Deacon Anthony Cullen serves as a Permanent Deacon at St. Benedict Church and School in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he also teaches religious education to middle school students as is the Director of Faith Formation. A married man and ordained minister of the Diocese of Trenton, he lives the unique vocation of the permanent deacon with one foot firmly in the secular world and the other in the sanctuary — husband, father, professional, and servant of the altar, all at once.

He holds a Master of Arts degree and serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Deacon Formation Program for the Diocese of Trenton through Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology. Beyond parish and academic ministry, he serves on the board of embrella (formerly Foster and Adoptive Family Services), a NJ nonprofit supporting foster, adoptive, and kinship families statewide. It was through this formation program that he connected Deacon Chris Ellis — an attorney and ordained with Deacon Anthony — to the embrella board, where Deacon Ellis now provides invaluable legal counsel. That is precisely the lesson: know who is in your class, build real relationships, and put the right people in the right places for the glory of God.

Deacon Anthony has made an annual silent retreat at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts — a Trappist monastery — for nearly twenty years. He brings that contemplative rootedness into everything he teaches.