Eulogy of Monsignor J. Tucek for John Joseph Moran
April 4, 1978
Saint Patrick Roman Catholic Church
Dallas, Texas

1) If at a funeral we are reminded the mere facts, without the priest saying it, that we too will lie in this place some day.

If we are to learn from the fact of death, we can also learn from the facts of life. We can learn from this man's death. We can learn from this man's life.

His death was exemplary (no complaints, no crying, deliberate and with courage); his life was exemplary. Even with its faults - even with its human faults - known to anyone who knew John Moran, it was an exemplary life. Which means that it was the kind of life we could hold up as an example for imitation.

2) That is what the saints are, isn't it? Those whose lives are held up to us for imitation. We commonly think of saints as idealized, as having no faults, as living in a kind of euphoric peace with hanmds folded and eyes closed in sweet repose, accepting the will of God, and being sanctimonious sponges who go through life with no will of their own, no thought of their own, no problems of their own, with no pain, no sufferings, no human faults to conquer. Not so! Have you ever known anyone of that description in the years you have lived in this life?

This is the terrible lie of the hagiographers, who write the lives of the saints, and would persuade us to think that the saints have lied a life quite other than the one we live -have lived an un-human life.

3) Quite the contrary! A saint is one who is sound, one who is healthy in his attitudes and relationships to both God and man. A saint is one who in honest fact lives as best he can with the help of God's grace, constantly trying to overcome his human weaknesses and failings, who lives in union with God and tries his best to do the will of God as he understands it.

4) That is the description of John Moran. I can hear his objections now, in a piping voice, a typical high-pitched Irish wheeze and holler - objecting at the mere suggestion that I would say that he was anything like a saint. He would find idea absolutely embarrassing.

5) But that is the point I make. And I will make it briefly because I know that John would also ask me to be brief in his eulogy. The point is that saints as we idealize them are impossible. The men who are the real examples of Christianity are credible. They can beat their breasts in a "mea Culpa" along with the so-called best of us. Yet they make no excuses for themselves as they continue to the very last- out of a lifetime of believing and struggling and praying and accepting and struggling again to the very last - to do what they believe so strongly God put them in this life to do. To live, to undergo the trial, to leave their love, to leave their mark, to suffer their pain, to die, and then to live again.

6) So what is the point of all this? What does it all mean? It means that life is a supremely challenging business which may not be taken lightly. It is by no means a holding action - treading water or staying unspotted by this world until the soul is freed from its prison house. Nothing of the sort!

Life is a challenging, mysterious business, the only fully satisfactory answer to which is something more mysterious still - the life Jesus lived.

Jesus Christ is the whole meaning of God to us. He is all the meaning of man to us. Jesus Christ is life, and death and resurrection to us.

And I believe - I know -John Moran, would say "Amen" to that.

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