Popular PD writer Bill McClellan offered a column this morning titled As election day nears, church and politics get a little testy.

Seems one Hugh McVey got up in church — in the middle of a sermon — and challenged the St. Louis priest, Fr. Noah Waldman. Details in the McClellan link above.

McClellan described Fr. Waldman this way:

He is 39 years old. He graduated from Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in May. He is a protege of Archbishop Raymond Burke whom he knew in Wisconsin.

Actually, there is more to Fr. Waldman than this. He was a deacon at St. Clement of Rome, our parish, before his ordination this past spring.

He has been a guest in our home.

He has an article on church architecture in the September issue of Adoremus: Beauty as Expanded Reason: The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton. He received his Master’s in Architecture from Notre Dame.

He is an excellent, careful speaker whose voice resonates to the last pew as well as the first. His homilies are informational, carefully prepared and, well, exciting. Not usually this exciting, however.

Bill McClellan received from the archdiocese a copy of Fr. Waldman’s sermon:

It was about the archbishop of Munich who challenged Hitler and National Socialism…..

Fr. Waldman is Jewish as well as Catholic, so it’s understandable he would be inspired by this archbishop of Munich.

We went to Fr. Waldman’s first Mass after his ordination last spring. The Mass was celebrated at St. Clement of Rome church.  His family was there. I went over to his mother after Mass and thanked her for giving us her son. It had to be hard for her. “He seems so happy, ” I said.  “Yes,” she said. “He is happy and so I am happy for him.”