Nuncio

You know, life was good.

And then a call comes [laughs] from the Apostolic Nuncio.

The Holy Father's appointed you auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles.

I thought, Los Angeles? How did that happen? What, what did...

You're called forth from yourself into an adventure.

And then, of course, it happened, what, six years after that.

Another phone call comes from another Apostolic Nuncio.

The Holy Father's appointed you bishop of Winona-Rochester.

On its right rises the cathedral.

On the left stands the unpretending palace of the Nuncio.

The former would be called beautiful were it kept in repair.

It has a splendid marble porch and a terrace with carved stone balustrade.

An Indian woman will sell you a real's worth of oranges any number of times, but she would object to parting with a dollar's worth.

Her arithmetic cannot comprehend it.

In the portals or arcades of the Aguia Mansion and the Nuncio's Palace are the stalls of the haberdashers.

Articles are not wrapped in paper.

Pope Leo XIV on Monday welcomed to the Vatican the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and all the East, His Beatitude Yuhanna X and his entourage.

Following that encounter, the Holy Father received in audience the Apostolic Nuncio to Rwanda, Archbishop Arnaud Occatan.

He also met with the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, who also doubles as Apostolic Delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine, Archbishop Giorgio Lingua.

Pope Leo concluded his appointments for Monday with a meeting with the delegation of the Italian Cystic Fibrosis League.

The Vatican on Monday published an apostolic letter or Motu Proprio of Pope Leo XIV, repealing the provisions introduced by Pope Francis in March twenty twenty-one that reduced the salaries of Holy See personnel, beginning with cardinals and heads of dicasteries of the Roman Curia.

Go in there and it's all in purple.

And a surplice, white lace, you know, and I said, dear God, who is he? You know who he was? The Papal Nuncio, my word, from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and where else? No, where I am, where I was.

Anyway, so he just came to greet me.

He probably was at Mass.

I mean, oh, life was good.

And then a call comes [laughs] from the Apostolic Nuncio.

"The Holy Father's appointed you auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles." I thought, "Los Angeles? How did that happen? What, what did..." Okay, I, I was summoned again out of cozy domesticity, a world that I knew very well, out of a safe space, into an adventure.

And how many times when I got to LA and then Santa Barbara, where I lived, and how many times that, in that first year did I say, "Where am I? [laughs] What happened to me? Who are these people?" But again, that's how it works.

You're called forth from yourself into an adventure.

And then, of course, it happened, what, six years after that, another phone call comes from another Apostolic Nuncio.

[laughs] "The Holy Father's appointed you bishop of Winona, Rochester." And so here I am right now in a studio in Rochester, Minnesota.

Uh, and again, when I arrived here, same thing.

Forsake your religion, or else I will give order to consume you with fire." close quote, Sultan Mehmed IV, 20 February 1683.

In the face of the Muslim peril, Emperor Leopold turned for counsel to the Apostolic Nuncio and Papal Legate, a Capuchin priest and a miracle worker named Blessed Marco d'Avignon.

Blessed Marco told the Emperor, quote, God is armed with scourges because he has been provoked by our sins.

We should appease him by humiliations, repentance, and self-denial.

Well, you gotta be chosen by the pope, so you really got nothing to do with it.

Uh, I was the rector of the seminary in Chicago, so I was the head of the seminary, right? And then one day, out of the blue, you get a phone call, and it came from this guy we call the Apostolic Nuncio, who's, like, the Vatican ambassador to the US.

And he says, "The Pope has appointed you auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles." That was my first bishop appointment.

So that's like the NFL draft almost for po- Is it kinda like that energy, like you're, like, waiting for this thing to-

I felt I had a centrality to this because I was at the Trinity Garden Party performing with my wonderful barbershop quartet, the Jolly Sunbeams, still available for weddings, bar mitzvahs and funerals, I think.

And... we were singing to the Papal Nuncio and we decided to sing that wonderful barbershop classic, Yes Sir, That's My Baby.

So we felt that we were really marking the occasion there for Bishop Casey.

But what's your recollection of the time?

We just announced yesterday that Jonathan Rumi is going to be one of our special guests.

We have the Nuncio coming.

We have so many amazing guests.

People can go to CelebrateSheen.com and find tickets to every single event that we're doing.