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Saturday evening at the 5 o'clock mass (not my mass), our bishop and the bishop emeritus (one of my favorite members of the clergy) came to our little parish about an hour and a half from the cathedral, and formally announced that our pastor had been designated a monsignor. It's more of an honorary title than a change in duties or (thank goodness) assignments; but, it's a personal selection/approval by the pope.

Sunday, we had a snap reception. It was supposed to be a bit of cake after the Life Teen mass around 6pm; but it turned into a major thing with cake, ice cream, and MARIACHIS. Good turnout considering it was just a blast on the parish's Facebook page. I think a few hundred people showed up.

I helped with the set up around 3:00, went to the 5:00 mass, then went to the celebration. I got the last piece of white cake. We ate through the spelling error on the cake ("Mon Signor" instead of "Monsignor"), some people started singing with the mariachi band and did some solos. I'd brought over the coffee part of the coffee/donut stuff we do for fundraisers so we'd have coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. The youth minister set up dispensers of Kool-Aid and lemonade along with a six-gallon cooler of ice water. The only expense was the two sheet cakes (with the misspelling). The rest of was the groups coming together to celebrate rather spontaneously.

We had priests from other cities come in to celebrate with us (they'd been assigned here before), and we had a great time. The newly designated monsignor said that this was about the parish, not about him. Our outreach, generosity, "lifestyle evangelization," and efforts to build up the community whether they are members of our parish or not.

Clean up afterwards ended around 8:00, so it was a bit of long day for me. But it wasn't over. I had to do the minutes for one of my organizations since we have a meeting next Saturday and I wanted to get them out. I still have minutes to do for the other church group.

BTW, the newly designated monsignor said that he'd prefer it if we continued to call him "Father"...but I'm not sure if it works that way. (He may be trying to save us a lot of work updating websites, bulletins, and other stuff. We'll see what happens.

I found out that Google Translate messes up Roman numerals when I tried to translate the Latin text on his certificate (from a picture posted on Facebook) into English. It was fine until it got to the year. It could read the date of the month and the month, but it couldn't get the year right. It read MMXXIV as 2014. I sent Google a note.

Yes, I've been grinning since I heard about the designation. That's why my cheeks hurt. I'm not used to smiling that much. Whenever I think about it, I smile again.