Lorenzo Albacete Cintrón (January 7, 1941 – October 24, 2014) was a....
Lorenzo Manuel Albacete Cintrón was born in 1941 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.The Way of Beauty God at the Ritz: A Tribute to Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete
In 2008, he sparred with the late Christopher Hitchins, the staunch, acerbic atheist. The topic was whether science makes belief in God obsolete.
Monsignor Albacete raised Hitchens’ book and remarked: “I read your book. You are an English wit. It’s great that they produce people like this,” adding, “and I love it. I’m a Puerto Rican monsignor, for God’s sake. My ancestors worshiped coconuts!” (Vitiello).
Born in 1941, Lorenzo Albacete was a proud native of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The overflowing crowd delighted in the repartee in which the priest diffused the anticipated tension and relaxed the atmosphere with his jovial and self-deprecating humor.
“At an event in New York, Hitchens remarked that Christianity, with its tenets about the afterlife, was worse than the North Korean dictatorship because ‘you can’t get out of it by dying.’ Monsignor Albacete, … compared the discovery of faith with another type of life-altering encounter.
‘You can’t help it,’ he said. ‘You’ve fa