I have been gathering and archiving Lorenzo Albacete’s writings and related audiovisual materials for the past five years. As a result, I now have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Albacete’s overall body of work, but writing the biographical essay was an opportunity to make connections between all these materials and discover the person behind them.
I can say, with joy and gratitude, that Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete was one of my mentors, and for a brief and very charmed time in my life, as I studied theology at the Pope John Paul II Institute in Washington DC in my early twenties, my way of seeing reality was permanently and dramatically changed by him. He gave me an infinite horizon.
He liked to be called El Santo (Spanish for “the Saint”). In almost anyone else on the planet it would be considered a sort of spiritual vanity or pretension. But in the case of Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, it was both a joke and a piece of deep theological wisdom.