According to this post by Kathryn Jean Lopez, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus has been administered the last rites, and the priest who offered the last rites has asked that we pray for a holy death for Fr. Neuhaus. It doesn’t look good. Lopez also excerpts some of the words that Fr. Neuhaus had previously written about death that offer us a glimpse into the reality of death:
We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.
Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.
Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.
Update: Fr. Neuhaus passed away today. I read about it a few minutes ago on The Catholic Report.
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January 13, 2009 at 7:34 pm |
Father Neuhaus will be very greatly missed. I’m not sure that we realize right now just how badly he WILL be missed.
May his soul and the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace.