The Word from Backstage

Some blinders for you:

• Note to bishops: please don't leave your cellphones on during Mass. And, should this happen and it rings, don't pull it out to check who's calling; if you're expecting Paloma, she'll call back. True, your people don't often know as much about you as they'd like -- but that probably doesn't extend to whether or not their chief shepherd has a "Carribean-techno sounding" ringtone.
  

• Some of our young clerics'll be envying their counterparts in one well-oiled US diocese. As a way of showing his appreciation, its bishop took all his priests ordained five years or less on a weeklong trip to Rome. Should you be curious: no, shopping sprees at Gammarelli were not on the chancery's dime... if they were, clergy offices everywhere would be in a panic that their hard-won Fruits of Wojtyla have headed for the hills. (SVILUPPO: It gets better; apparently, a "highlight" of the sojourn was a courtesy call on last weekend's Birthday Boy and the canon who, for some God-forsaken reason, has come to be known widely as "Boom-Boom." I'm not kidding. No wonder David Lewis is doing somersaults down in the crypt.)
  

• What's more important -- Old Mass or New Money? You tell me, because I'm hearing that in one diocese, a "very, very wealthy individual" is withholding giving more than his usual quota until the local church "starts to be more generous with requests" for the Indult Mass. While it's said that the donor "could deliver $25 million directly... to the diocese in 2 days' time," the petitioner "wants to see the bishop and his crew make the right moves first." As the string-attaching giver is supposedly not one of the Tridentine crowd, himself, that just makes it even more notable.
  

-30-