Thanks to all of you here today: for your prayers, your presence and your love in Christ.
Welcome to this holy sacrifice of the Mass which we offer for the repose of the soul of my mother, Mary.
So many more to thank, so many lives intertwined here and in many other ways through the gift of life. On behalf of my father and our family, please know of our sincere gratitude.
To die will be the most difficult thing that any of us will do. Death is both the last and the most important act of our lives in this vale of tears. Why is this so? As death approaches, with whatever awareness remains, we confront increasingly the total detachment the end of life here on earth entails. And at the same time we are in faith offered the possibility in grace of total adherence to God. It is the one act that determines our destiny for eternity. We must die a holy death, in loving communion with the Lord, in order to enter into the eternal dwelling place which He has prepared for each one of us.
Is it not for these reason that the Word of God teaches that we are truly blessed when faith means for us that we die to ourselves and to our own will daily so as to love the Lord and His holy will above all things? And so for Mary, in her call to holiness through her vocation as wife and mother, loving the Lord and others through worship and servanthood.
In comparison with eternity this very short life on earth pales in importance, to say the least. What would it profit a man, as Scripture says, if he were to gain even the whole world and yet suffer the loss his eternal soul? It is not possible to conceive of any greater tragedy or evil.
My mother has now passed through this final crucible, her life drawing to a close after the damages of Alzheimer's had ravaged her bright, intelligent mind and courageous will and thus, also, increasingly her body. But she also had the irreplaceable treasure of her Catholic Faith, and a lifetime of prayer and grace because of it, to prepare her for that greatest and final moment.
Our human nature is such that we often only gradually cooperate with grace, such that we fail even often to do God's will in love of Him and for His sake. We seek our own good or our own will apart from, or in opposition to, true love for the Lord and for others. Our obedience at times lags or completely disappears and we can fall into serious sin, and must then repent and return to the right path that leads to heaven.
Let us not forget that there is no neutral or middle ground between heaven and hell. “If you are lukewarm I will spew you out of My mouth,’ says the Lord. We either go to heaven after we die, perhaps passing through purgatory for a time, or we are cast body and soul into Gehenna, where the suffering due to our selfishness and sin is eternal and too horrible to describe. Satan began as an angel of light, and thus “Lucifer”. He still often appears in attractive guise to our weak and easily deceived humanity.
The child visionaries at Fatima were so shocked and frightened by the vision of hell which our Blessed Mother allowed them to see that in their pure and innocent love they would painfully dehydrate themselves in order to do penance for and to save unrepentant sinners. How many today live in complete ignorance of, or worse, rejection of Our Lord and His mercy, endangering their eternal happiness?
Not so for my parents, who were both formed and educated by faithful priests and religious women who played important roles in their lives along with their faithful parents in the context of what was then a yet intact Catholic Tradition.
The truth, goodness and beauty of the Catholic faith and tradition was readily available, presumed even, in every parish without fail. Rare was the place where leaders of the Church openly displayed disobedience and scorn for the holy Mass, the Sacraments, and the irreplaceable role of the sacred in our lives. All too common around us today are the results of the spiritually corrosive effect of the degradation of the sacred places and things which our Catholic tradition uses to hand on and build up our saving Faith.
Mary passed away peacefully, breathing her last with the grace of the Sacraments, on November 6 at 86 years of age. She went forth from us in the month of the Holy Souls and in the octave of All Saints. We take great consolation in the message God's timing sends us as our temporal life and death unfolds within the liturgical cycle. Our prayer and devotion always connects us to the Lord and the heavenly realities as we worship with the Church, drawing us more deeply into the mysteries of faith and the life of grace, the foretaste and promise of eternal life.
Mary and Richard joined this parish in 1962. For almost 60 years Mary was active in organizing dances, dinners and fundraisers for both Saint Mary’s School and Saint Vincent Pallotti High School. She sang in the choir. But, more than that, Mary was a staunch supporter of the prolife movement, especially through the parish bus trip to DC for the annual March for Life.
As soon as the evil of Roe V. Wade was given the sanction of "law" Mary knew immediately a battle was ahead for all those who understand the truth handed down by the Church in Christ. The sacredness of every human life, a self-evident fact for establishing which religion is unnecessary, as she knew from her Catholic formation and nursing experience, demanded defending on the part of every member of the Body of Christ. And, she knew, just as the Body of Christ is one, so is the truth. Anyone who contemplates taking away or denying any truth compromises the entire edifice of faith.
The little lessons of virtue so essential for forming young souls were ours. One example: the Cusick family did not check the weather forecast to determine whether we would attend the annual March for Life or not. No matter the physical discomfort the weather might bring each year, our commitment to witness for the sacredness of human life everywhere, to include the mother’s womb, was not negotiable. Also, despite the fact that we were out on the sailboat every weekend in season we found our way to Mass for keeping the Lord’s Day holy. And this before cell phones and the internet. We were indeed blessed with holy and apostolic witness by our parents.
There were two kinds of suffering in Mary’s life.
The first type of suffering comes to all of us simply as a result of original sin through our mortal flesh: our human nature, prone to disease and death. We must choose to join our weakness to that of the Perfect God-Man on the Cross, that it may avail for our sanctification.
The second kind of suffering results from our free choice to live out in our actions the practical effects of the truth which we profess in our Catholic Faith. This is the witness of martyrdom, and there are many kinds of witness, as unique as each one of us here. Complete adherence to Christ suffering and risen, no matter the consequences in this life, is for the sake of the next life, eternal and blessed with the beatific vision. “We shall be like God, for we shall see Him as He is.” This is love for Love Himself.
Mary chose this witness for love of God and souls and suffered for it.
In the beatitudes Christ teaches, “Blessed are you when men curse you, and revile you and utter every kind of slander against you falsely, because of Me. Your reward in heaven will be great.” I pray, and ask you to join me, that the Lord’s promise to Mary and to each one of us will indeed be fulfilled inasmuch as we suffer like her for the sake of faithfulness to He Who is Truth in all things and in all circumstances.
We will all one day share with Mary the suffering and final corruption of our mortal flesh which Our Lord, the Person of the Word, took to the Cross. This flesh in the Person of the Word was united to His Divinity, that by means of His suffering and death He might offer Us eternal life in Himself.
May we follow Mary’s example, as we also choose to suffer for the sake of righteousness that, with her, we may look with confidence to eternal blessedness. And may we ever pray for Mary, for all the departed and also for ourselves, in particular joined to this perfect prayer of the holy Mass each Sunday as we together keep the Lord’s Day holy, wherever we are.
Our Lord will be present here today, in this as in every holy Mass, the Holy Eucharist as foretaste and promise of heaven. Food for our faith and salvation, His Presence as God and Man demands discernment of us. This means that if we are guilty of mortal sin or do not hold and believe all that the Church holds and believes, we cannot receive Him worthily and so must abstain. This is to avoid both undertaking a useless act and the further sinfulness of sacrilege. He first offers forgiveness of sin in Confession to prepare for Communion and the grace of repentance and conversion if we have fallen away from the Faith and its practice.
Why? As Pope Benedict explained, "death opens up to life, to eternal life, which is not an infinite duplicate of the present time, but something completely new". It this newness of eternal life in divine love which is the prize which we must seek through all our earthly strivings, for “he who perseveres to the end will be saved”.
May Mary's soul, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.
Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
(I delivered the above remarks as the homily at my mother’s funeral Mass on November 17th, 2023. In photo: manutergium with oils of priesthood ordination placed in the hands of a deceased mother of a priest.)
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