Transition, Accomplished

Before anything else, just take in the shot....

A powerful moment. In a whole host of ways.

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Jurisdictionally speaking, the handover might've taken just the better part of a year... but in a way, what happened earlier today in LA was a far longer time in coming.

Sure, we could say "it is accomplished"... but given the historic nature of it all, it might be more fitting to say, "hoy, ahora, es consumado."

In the 456th year since the Spanish settlement of Florida at St Augustine, 314 years after Spanish Jesuits built the first California mission...

....222 years from the establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States, 171 years since the Famine and the rise of the Irish -- the same year as the founding of California's first diocese...

...three-quarters of a century past since Los Angeles became a metropolitan see, 58 years from the creation of the first "Cardinal of the West" -- and at the close of the monumental, oft-controversial 25-year tenure of the native son who, some would say, gave its Catholic community the courage to be itself...

...a son of Mexico is the archbishop of Los Angeles, the nation's largest local church. And with it, reflecting the rise of a people soon to form the majority of these shores' 68 million faithful, the "Anglo ceiling" of American Catholicism's topmost leadership has been shattered once and for all.

And given all that, who needs the Oscars?

Texts, etc. to come.

SVILUPPO: Gomez and Mahony fullaudio posted.

PHOTO: Getty

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