right-aligned numbering

Dear Readers,

my goal is to get an output like this:

---------------------

      some date
   #. some title
      para para pa-
      ra para para

...

      some date
###. some title
      para para pa-
      ra para para

---------------------

where # is a number [1-5000...]

Putting the "###. title" line either into a table-environment (with two 
cells) or using the list-item-environment, FOP 0.20.2 gives me an 
out-of-memory error, whereas just simply using the fo:block works fine, but 
I don't know how to format the numbers nicely, i.e. right-aligned numbers 
in front of left-aligned paragraph.

So please, what is the usual way to do this?

TIA, David