A bishop’s ring is a weighty thing. It is a golden seal of office, a symbol of fidelity to the Church, and, in the case of Bishop Mark O’Connell of Albany, New York, a deeply personal masterpiece. And as it turns out, even the most sacred objects are not exempt from the potential perils of soapy dishwater and a kitchen sink.

It was during a quiet evening at the rectory kitchen next to Albany’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception that the symbol of his office vanished.

“I was finishing dinner — I cook my own dinner — so I must have washed my hands and [the ring] gets loose,” Bishop O’Connell recalled to The Evangelist, the newspaper of the Diocese of Albany. “I looked down at my finger; there’s no ring.”

The disappearance triggered an immediate, quiet panic. This was not a piece of jewelry that could be easily replaced at a local shop.

"It’s gold. It has St. Andrew, my saint on it, and it has my motto (Invenimus Messiam). It was made by the father of a personal friend,” he explained. "He was a goldsmith in Italy, and it was gifted to me right after my ordination as a bishop. Inside, it has my name and the date I was ordained a bishop. So it is very special to me and I wear it all the time.”

What followed was a meticulous, room-by-room search that felt more like a crime-scene investigation than a hunt for a misplaced item.

“I carefully searched everywhere in the kitchen, including the garbage disposal and the trash. I went through everything, and then I went into the pantry; I looked in the pantry. I looked everywhere; I could not find it. I then searched my room and hoped it would show up.”

But the search turned up nothing. Days turned into weeks. Eventually, the bishop had to accept a disconcerting reality.

“After a few days of it not showing up I realized, ‘Okay, I lost my ring and someday it may show up,’” he said.

The Ghost of Bishops Past

A bishop cannot go about his public duties barehanded. Needing a temporary stand-in, Bishop O’Connell paid a visit to Amy Brozio-Andrews, the archivist for the Diocese of Albany, to see what history had left behind.

“I went to the archives and asked if they had any bishop’s rings, and she had nine of them, so I wore an unidentified bishop’s ring," he said. “We don’t know whose it was, but I wore a past bishop of Albany’s ring for over a month and a half.”

For six weeks, Bishop O’Connell walked around wearing the jewelry of a long-dead predecessor. The mysterious, borrowed ring quickly became a conversation starter. During a confirmation Mass, a curious guest noticed the unfamiliar band on his finger and later asked him about its origin.

“I said, ‘I’m wearing the ring of a deceased bishop. I don’t know whose it is because I lost my ring,’" Bishop O’Connell recalled with a chuckle.

“After that conversation, this woman comes up to me and she says, ‘I told my mother about the ring and she wants to know if you went down to the crypt.’”

For the record, the bishop did not.

A Cracker Jack ‘Miracle’

The mystery finally unraveled on June 12, thanks to an open bag of Utz potato chips and a hungry fellow priest.

Father Rendell Torres, the former rector of the cathedral, was rummaging through the rectory pantry when he spotted the stale bag of chips, which had been sitting open, and ignored, for a month and a half. He reached in for a snack — only to pull out a handful of gold.

“He had reached in for a potato chip ... and there was my ring like a Cracker Jack prize,” Bishop O’Connell recounted.

In a moment of distracted searching weeks prior, the bishop had apparently dropped the ring right into the bag while grabbing a quick snack. Had anyone with a passion for spring cleaning decided to tidy up the pantry during those six weeks, the priceless heirloom would have been lost to the local landfill.

“If I had gone to the pantry, I would have known that that was a really old bag of chips and I would have thrown them out, so it’s quite lucky that the ring is not in the dump in the potato chip bag,” he admitted. “I had given up. I have a trip to Rome, and I was planning on buying a new ring there; and getting one made, perhaps the same one. I had totally given up, and there it is.”

Seeking Assistance From St. Anthony

In hindsight, Bishop O’Connell believes the six-week delay might have been a bit of divine retribution for a joke he made at the expense of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things.

“Everyone asks about St. Anthony,” he joked. “I think I perhaps disrespected Anthony early in this because in that same group that asked about the ring [at the confirmation], they asked about St. Anthony, and I said, ‘Well, Anthony can’t find everything because he can’t find my golf ball.’ So perhaps I disrespected Anthony, but he came through in the end because I did pray to him.”

With the gold band safely back on his finger, the bishop of Albany’s bizarre ordeal leaves the faithful with a brand-new spiritual discipline: Keep your prayers to St. Anthony sincere — and always, always check the bottom of the chip bag.