Your Eminence Cardinal Wuerl, Your Excellencies, Archbishop Viganò, Bishop Loverde, Bishop Higgins, my brother priests, deacons, distinguished guests, dear friends and faithful gathered:
On behalf of our mother and the
entire Scalia family, I want to thank you for your presence here, for your many
words of consolation, and even more for the many prayers and Masses you
have offered at the death of our father, Antonin Scalia.
In particular I thank Cardinal
Wuerl, first for reaching out so quickly and so graciously to
console our mother. It was a consolation to her and therefore to us as
well. Thank you also for allowing us to have this parish funeral Mass here in
this basilica dedicated to Our Lady. What a great privilege and
consolation that we were able to bring our father through the holy doors and
for him gain the indulgence promised to those who enter in faith.
I thank Bishop
Loverde, the bishop of our diocese of Arlington, a bishop our father
liked and respected a great deal. Thank you, Bishop Loverde, for your
prompt visit to our mother, for your words of consolation, for your prayers.
The family will depart for the
private burial immediately after Mass and will not have time to visit, so I
want to express our thanks at this time so that you all know our profound
appreciation and thanks. You will notice in the program mention of a
memorial that will be held on March 1st. We hope to see many of you there. We
hope the Lord will repay your great goodness to us.
We are gathered here because of
one man. A man known personally to many of us, known only by reputation to even
more. A man loved by many, scorned by others. A man known for
great controversy, and for great compassion. That man, of course,
isJesus of Nazareth.
It is He whom we proclaim.
Jesus Christ, son of the father, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified,
buried, risen, seated at the right hand of the Father. It is because of him.
because of his life, death and resurrection that we do not mourn as those
who have no hope, but in confidence we commend Antonin Scalia to the mercy of
God.
Scripture says Jesus
Christ is the same yesterday today and forever. And that sets a good course for
our thoughts and our prayers here today. In effect, we look in three
directions. To yesterday, in thanksgiving. To today, in petition. And into
eternity, with hope.
We look to Jesus Christ
yesterday, that is, to the past, in thanksgiving for the blessings God bestowed
upon Dad. In the past week, many have recounted what Dad did for them. But
here today, we recount what God did for Dad, how he blessed him.
We give thanks first of all for
the atoning death and life-giving resurrection of JesusChrist. Our Lord died and rose not only for
all of us, but also for each of us. And at this time we look to that yesterday
of his death and resurrection, and we give thanks that he died and rose for
Dad.
Further, we give thanks that
Jesus brought him to new life in baptism, nourished him with the Eucharist, and healed him in the
confessional.
We give thanks that Jesus
bestowed upon him 55 years of marriage to the woman he loved, a woman who could
match him at every step, and even hold him accountable.
God blessed Dad with a deep
Catholic faith: The conviction that Christ's presence and power continue in the
world today through His body, the Church. He loved the clarity and coherence of
the church's teachings. He treasured the church's ceremonies, especially
the beauty of her ancient worship. He trusted the power of her sacraments as
the means of salvation as Christ working within him for his salvation.
Although one time, one Saturday
afternoon, he did scold me for having heard confessions that afternoon, that
same day. And I hope that it's some source of consolation, if there are any
lawyers present, that the Roman collar was not a shield against his criticism.
The issue that evening was not
that I had been hearing confessions, but that he had found himself in my
confessional line, and he quickly departed it. As he put it later, "Like
heck if I'm confessing to you!"
The feeling was mutual.
God blessed Dad, as is
well known, with a love for his country. He knew well what a close-run thing
the founding of our nation was. And he saw in that founding, as did the
founders themselves, a blessing, a blessing quickly lost when faith is
banned form the public square, or when we refuse to bring it there. So he
understood that there is no conflict between loving God and loving one's
country, between one's faith and one's public service. Dad understood that
the deeper he went in his Catholic faith, the better a citizen and public
servant he became. God blessed him with the desire to be the country's
good servant because he was God's first.
We Scalias, however, give
thanks for a particular blessing God bestowed. God blessed Dad with a love for
his family. We have been thrilled to read and hear the many words of praise and
admiration for him, for his intellect, his writings, his speeches, his
influence and so on.
But more important to us — and to him —
is that he was Dad. He was the father that God gave us for the great adventure
of family life. Sure he forgot our names at times, or mixed them up, but
there are nine
of us.
He loved us, and sought to show
that love. And sought to share the blessing of the faith he treasured. And he
gave us one another, to have each other for support. That's the greatest wealth
parents can bestow, and right now we are particularly grateful for it.
So we look to the past, to
Jesus Christ yesterday. We call to mind all of these blessings, and we
give our Lord the honor and glory for them, for they are His work. We look
to Jesus today, in petition, to the present moment, here and now, as we mourn
the one we love and admire, the one whose absence pains us. Today we pray for
him. We pray for the repose of his soul. We thank God for his goodness to
Dad as is right and just. But we also know that although dad believed, he
did so imperfectly, like the rest of us. He tried to love God and
neighbor, but like the rest of us did so imperfectly.
He was a practicing
Catholic, "practicing" in
the sense that he hadn't perfected it yet. Or rather, Christ was not yet
perfected in him. And only those in whom Christ is brought to perfection can
enter heaven. We are here, then, to lend our prayers to that perfecting, to
that final work of God's grace,
in freeing Dad from every encumbrance of sin.
But don't take my word for it.
Dad himself, not surprisingly, had something to say on the matter. Writing
years ago to a Presbyterian
minister whose funeral service he
admired, he summarized quite nicely the pitfalls of funerals and why he didn't
like eulogies.
He wrote: "Even when
the deceased was an admirable person, indeed especiallywhen the
deceased was an admirable person, praise for his virtues can cause us to
forget that we are praying for and giving thanks for God's inexplicable mercy
to a sinner."
Now he would not have exempted
himself from that. We are here then, as he would want, to pray for God's
inexplicable mercy to a sinner. To this sinner, Antonin Scalia. Let us not show
him a false love and allow our admiration to deprive him of our
prayers. We continue to show affection for him and do good for him by
praying for him: That all stain of sin be washed away, that all wounds be
healed, that he be purified of all that is not Christ. That he rest in peace.
Finally we look to Jesus
forever, into eternity. Or better, we consider our own place in eternity and
whether it will be with the Lord. Even as we pray for Dad to enter swiftly into
eternal glory, we should be mindful of ourselves. Every funeral reminds us of
just how thin the veil is between this world and the next, between time and
eternity, between the opportunity for conversion and the moment of
judgment.
So we cannot depart here unchanged.
It makes no sense to celebrate God's goodness and mercy to Dad if we are not
attentive and responsive to those realities in our own lives. We
must allow this encounter with eternity to change us, to turn us from sin and
towards the Lord.
The English Dominican, Father Bede Jarrett, put it beautifully when
he prayed, "O strong son of God, while you prepare a place for us,
prepare us also for that happy place, that we may be with you and with
those we love for all eternity."
Jesus Christ is the same,
yesterday, today and forever,.
My dear friends, this is also
the structure of the Mass, the greatest prayer we can offer for Dad, because
it's not our prayer, but the Lord's. The Mass looks to Jesus
yesterday. It reaches into the past — reaches to the Last
Supper, to the crucifixion, to the resurrection — and it makes those
mysteries and their power present here on this altar.
Jesus himself becomes present
here today under the form of bread and wine so that we can unite all our
prayers of thanksgiving, sorrow and petition with Christ himself as an offering
to the father. And all of this with a view to eternity, stretching towards
heaven, where we hope one day to enjoy that perfect union with God himself and
to see Dad again and, with him, rejoice in the communion of saints.
Comments: This is Kerygma! Fr. Paul's Father is not an idol but a reciprocating icon of the Person of Jesus Christ. Paul leads his hearers into thinking that he is talking about his father, when the protagonist of the entire homily is Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and forever.
His father's significance (as all of us) is found in the blessings received from the Lord in the past
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The blessings receive in the present: but not without sin. There is a great and mature realism here that makes the entire presentation believable and applicable. Fr. Paul does not canonize his father, but presents the portrait of a wonderful man as believer, husband, father, professional, patriot. Yet our love for him must not be a "false love" that would " allow our admiration to deprive him of our prayers." He has not died as "Ipse Christus" yet. There is work that is still to be done - now, bound together as we are by the communion of saints.
It is significant that the ideal is not moral goodness or high virtue but an identity with Christ Himself, and that only as such does Nino - or anyone - "rest in peace." Thanksgiving is given to God, not for the goodness of Justice Scalia but for the goodness of God to him, "God's inexplicable mercy to a sinner."
And then, the reciprocating icon of one who is not idol but one of us: we must not leave here unchanged. "It makes no sense to celebrate God's goodness and mercy to Dad if we are not attentive and responsive to those realities in our own lives. We must allow this encounter with eternity to change us, to turn us from sin and towards the Lord." Conversion.
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