St Anthony of Padua Does It Again

We have the Bishop coming to Lamford this Easter Day to baptise and confirm about a dozen people from the parish. At 6am. And he volunteered.

Anyway. This Sunday morning at quarter to 8 Il Rettore bursts into the sacristy to announce that the confirmation register is missing. 'Where did you put it?' 'What, you mean two years ago?' I respond in an instantly ill temper. Rettore then races round for ten minutes trying to find the errant document. I really didn't think it was the time for a search, but most of my irritation arose from the guilty thought that I might, indeed, have lost the thing. Could I have left it at the cathedral after the confirmations in 2007? No, they failed to find it in their lost property box yesterday. (There was one from another church, however).

This afternoon I spotted a box behind another box under a desk in the photocopier room in the parish centre and there, among obselete liturgical books and Bibles nobody bothers to read, was a telltale glimpse of green binding. The register is found. Not before we bought another one, of course. It was moved along with all the other stuff from the church during our electrical works 18 months ago. Of such details is parish life composed, and our little sins and repentances.