They're blogging about me in Latin now.

That must mean I have vaulted to the ranks of the big-time bloggers. Check it out! (I'm pretty sure someone had to make up the word "photographias".)

An equivalent post in English is here-- but you'll be more impressed with me if you don't know what it's saying.

My friends and I took a road trip to San Diego last Nov. 23 to visit that FSSP parish, and there we met a couple of those Brothers of the Little Oratory and got to see them all celebrate Vespers. It was a lovely and unexpected way to end the day. I wish I'd had time to quiz the Brothers about St. Philip Neri (who founded the Oratory in the 1500's) and Cardinal Newman (who started one up in England in the 1800's). They say of St. Philip Neri that his second favorite book in the world was a joke book, and that when people insisted on treating him as a saint he'd deliberately do ridiculous things to try to put a stop to it. Also his heart was so filled with love that it expanded and cracked his ribcage-- see him trying to hold it in? :)

The church was in the midst of a remodeling because the FSSP had only recently taken it over from the diocese. The first thing they did was move the very heavy marble altar back to the wall, and then they spent hours jackhammering out the cement platform that it had been standing on in the middle of the sanctuary. That NO asthetic dies hard!