Memoirs of a Presser

Just returning from the Premier See, where it always feels like family reunion, and where this was certainly a day to remember.

Full report coming, but in the meantime our friends at the Catholic Review have done it up (and then some) with a fully-loaded package including specially-taped interviews and the events on videostream. And the dear gang over at the Sun -- which sent a delegation of no less than four at the morning briefing and noon Mass -- is likewise going all-out.

Sight of the day: 9.40am, Baltimore Basilica, North Aisle.... As aides paced about making sure everything was in place, standing kindly by and grinning as ever was the impromptu welcoming committee of one: William Donald Borders, 94 in October, witnessing the presentation of his successor's successor. The 13th archbishop, Borders held Carroll's chair from 1974-89.

A onetime Army chaplain himself stationed on the front in World War II, he's still well and kickin'. May it be a good omen for the next of the line.

Oh, and while reporters were cautioned against "reading too much" into the appointment of the lone US bishop to have helmed two seminaries to lead the only American see with two of its own, at Edwin O'Brien's first Eucharist in his new charge, the prayer-texts of the Thursday of the 14th Week of the Year conspicuously went out the window...

...in their place: the Votive Mass for Vocations to the Priesthood.

No mere coincidence, that.

More soon.

PHOTO: Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun

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