“Wait, is the YAG even happening this year? Who’s organizing it now that Colleen is gone?”
I have heard some variation of this question a good handful of times, and I am here to answer it officially. The respective answers are “yes” and “me”.
My name is Nathaniel Arnold. I attended my first YAG in 2020, right before I moved to St. Gertrude’s from Chicago. I was a newer sedevacantist at the time and wondered if people in my new community were ever going to measure up to the wonderful people I knew (and still know) in the Novus Ordo indult and in the Society. So that first YAG was a godsend. It confirmed for me that yes, sedes were just as delightful as the marvelous characters I knew in the past, and I was not plunging myself into a sad and dark cult like a melodramatic Novus Ordo friend of mine once predicted to me.
I was never really on social media, but I did somehow know that Colleen was a sede Twitter superstar, and I was commensurately starstruck when I first met her. Her first impressions of me were colored by the circumstances of one of my first appearances at St. Gertrude’s during Holy Week of 2020, when I darkened the doors of the church wearing not only a very diapery-looking cloth mask that my mother had sewed, but also “purple” latex gloves — Colleen said later “but when I saw the purple gloves I almost died!” They were blue, I insist, but just that purple-adjacent blue common to bluish latex gloves, and they and the mask were worn only for the purposes of placating my nervous family, who for their part calmed down later when they realized what a nothingburger everything was.
When the memory of that inauspicious beginning had faded a bit, Colleen and I actually dated for a short period, and while we decided that our marrying was neither God’s nor anyone else’s will, I did get to witness up close the virtues that helped her reign for seven benign and fruitful years as YAGermeister. She was almost completely unoffendable; drama died on her doorstep; she never spoke but to solve a problem; she contained not a sliver of self-aggrandizement; and almost bewilderingly, you couldn’t get her to gossip if you prodded her with a red-hot gossip iron. In case you ever wondered about the character of the woman who talked to everybody and who guarded spreadsheets of your personal data —there really could not have been anyone more suited to that role.
There still isn’t, but now you have me, since Providence deigned to grant Colleen her own portion of the fruits of her years of beneficent labor. You might imagine that two people that had the idea to date for a bit and then didn’t marry are similar in big ways and stubbornly different in little ones, and that’s true of her and myself. So I may change some window dressing and be very proud of it, but the YAG will always remain essentially the same YAG that Colleen had the charity and initiative to resurrect almost eight years ago.
And you know, just because she lives in Patrick’s cozy sod house on the plains of Nebraska doesn’t mean it’s too late to write to tell her thank you for the impact her work had on your life!
I didn’t-fact check the sod house thing, I just assume that’s how all Nebraskans live.
It’s probably not sod.
God bless and thank you!
Nathaniel
