Monsignor Balducci used to leave his Christmas decorations up all year long so that I could enjoy them when I visited him at his home!
Monsignor Balducci is a dear friend who lived up the street from me as I lived next door to St. Peter’s in Rome. Often we would dine together. He was a great host. We would often spend New Year’s Eve together and he had the habit of leaving his Christmas decorations up all year. Often I would ask permission to bring over foreign researchers to meet him. We first bonded at the may 1999 conference in San Marino where I was translator for Dr. John Mack.
To me he was also very much like J. Allen Hynek in that he was often distracted by metaphysical concepts and would stray off into different tangents. He was a very random abstract thinker. One of the most heartwarming meetings I experienced was when I introduced Balducci to ex-priest Dr. Richard Boylan and they both communicated in Latin. Father Balducci had a captive audience as he cited many of the old church fathers, and although he did not agree with all of Dr. Boylan’s ideas, he listened carefully and pensively to what Boylan called his star visitor theology.
