A wonderful evening

By God's grace, earlier this evening (it's now Wednesday morning at 00h14!) I was privileged to attend the annual parish dinner of my TLM Community. The food was good, the wine was excellent and our speaker was brilliant! He was Steve Wood, founder of St Joseph's Covenant Keepers. He is a former evangelical protestant pastor who converted, along with his family, in 1990. Check out his website at dads.org. He was a bit delayed in arriving, since he was originally scheduled to speak on 11 September 2001, but he finally made it!

We were also blessed with the presence of a number of Traditional Priests. I know that the FSSP and ICKSP were represented, but I don't know if one of the many cassocks covered an SSPX Priest. A special honour, however, was the presence of His Excellency, the Most Reverend Robert W. Finn, Bishop of Kansas City-St Joseph. When I met him, he was talking with the 82 year old mother of a friend of mine. I dropped to my knee, kissed his ring and said, "Your Excellency is becoming world famous. You have the right enemies." He laughed at that. Then my friend's mother said, "I'm sorry I didn't kiss your ring," and very, very slowly dropped to her knee and did so! His Excellency helped her back to her feet. I'm not sure she could have made it on her own. While it was moving to be able to honour a truly Catholic Bishop in the traditional manner, what was more moving and almost brought tears to my eyes, was the sight of this 82 year old woman, the mother of a large Catholic family and the grandmother and great grandmother of God knows how many, creaking slowly down on one knee to do His Excellency honour and through him to honour our Lord Jesus Christ, whose successor the Bishop is.