Michael Sean Winters shares his remembrances of Monsignor Albacete.
“It was the spring of 1993, Good Friday to be exact. I had known Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete for only a few months. That night, Lorenzo and his beloved brother Manuel, and a third person whom I do not recall, came into Kramerbooks & Afterwords for dinner. They were seated at table 40, right near the stairs that lead down to the prep kitchen. I can remember it as if it was yesterday. The waitress took their order and I stood by her as she wrote it down. When all three of them ordered lamb chops, I interjected. “You can’t have lamb chops – it’s Good Friday.” Without missing a beat, Lorenzo said, “Oh, Mike, [he was the only person who ever called me “Mike”], we had an ancestor who died fighting in the Crusades and have a dispensation in perpetuity.” I knew I was in the presence of someone whose understanding of our faith was very, very different from the Irish-American Catholicism in which I had been raised.”
Read the full article at The National Catholic Reporter: Remembering Lorenzo, by Michael Sean Winters.
