September 12 was opening day for the school year at St. Joseph Seminary in 1960.  Among the nearly 100 new seminarians that arrived that day were Lee and myself.  I don't actually remember meeting Lee; I must have met him within the next day or two, since we were both in the same class division.  Lee, it seems, was just always there.

            Lee was already tall; he was also painfully thin.  For many years, he seemed to just get taller and taller, before he started growing in the other direction.  He was punctiliously neat in all the spaces he occupied, in his dress, and in the perfection of his handwriting.  The neatness abated somewhat in later years, but the graceful handwriting remained.  He already had the eye for detail, the photographic memory, the keen intelligence and the quick wit that combined to make him unique.

            As for detail, he called himself “Eagle Eye,” and his height gave him a good vantage point from which to observe dress and behavior.  He has an even better vantage point now than he had when he was on his feet.  Have no doubt, he knows who's here – and he is grateful.  He also knows who's not here.  

            As for memory, Lee could give courses to elephants.  I had to look up the date in 1960 for the opening day:  Lee could tell you.  I can only guess at the number in our class:  Lee could give it to you. 

            His eye for detail and his quick wit – combined with his total confidence in his own taste – made him a keen aesthetic critic.  From his extraordinary height, and with that backward tilt of the head characteristic of contact-wearers, he could look down the length of his nose on offending objets.  He had nicknames for every miter, crozier, and cathedral between here and Miami.  He disliked intensely the renovation of the Abbey Church, and for twelve years, almost every conversation between us included a rant on some aspect of it.  There was a brief respite after he visited the new Cathedral in Los Angeles – his review:  “So this is what you get for 250 million dollars.”  He liked the San Francisco Cathedral much better, but it reminded him of the agitator in a washing machine, so he could not resist dubbing it “St. Mary Maytag.”  Quite proud of these zingers, he would never hesitate to tell you about them himself, just in case you didn't have had the privilege of hearing them at their first run.

            From that first year in high school, Lee had two ambitions.  One was to own a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud.  He lovingly kept a full-colour brochure on it in his desk.  He observed quiet mourning when the model was discontinued in favor of the Silver Dawn, which he considered inferior.  The huge Buicks he later drove were not really a substitute – they were, as he put it, “Merely something worthy to carry the Blessed Sacrament in.”

            The aspiration to the Rolls reflected his aesthetic sense, which, lacking the Rolls, he indulged in Waterford crystal.  If he mourned the passing of the Silver Cloud, Waterford should declare a day of mourning for one of their best customers.  He was known at the glassworks:  on a trip there, he was being shown around (the nearest the Republic of Ireland got to visiting royalty), when he came across a glass shillelagh.  The glass had a tiny flaw (he could see it), and it was about to be destroyed, but Lee (never the shrinking violet), said, “Don't destroy it; give it to me” – not “Sell it to me” but “Give it to me”  – and they did!

            His more serious ambition was to be a priest, and, as a priest, he was always genuinely happy.  He served two five-year stints as associate pastor, at St. Leo the Great and St. Francis Xavier.  His pastor at St. Francis, Msgr. Bezou (presumably a good judge of men), liked and trusted Lee enough to make him executor of his estate.  Lee's first pastorate in Arabi came shortly before his tenth anniversary – not bad for those days of many priests.  He was a priest for 39 years, serving in only four parishes:  he was never run out by a pastor, never run out by the people.  

            But, if he was happy as a priest, he still had sorrows and griefs.  He was an only child, so the deaths of his parents touched him deeply – especially his mother; for several years, they had had only each other.  He also lost his closest priest-buddies, Kenny Ryan in 1994 and Earl LaRose in 1995, to heart attacks – the latter while they were on a much anticipated vacation in Paris with Henry Englebrecht and Willie Meridier.  Lee was proud that his high-school French enabled him to stand up to the Gallic bureaucracy and get Earl's body out for burial.  He suffered the loss of another life-long friend and mentor in 1996 when Bobby Muench, a fellow St. Raphaelite, who was taken from New Orleans to become bishop of Covington, Kentucky.   He attributed his struggle with alcoholism, in part, to the loneliness these several losses uncovered within him.

            He once said that becoming pastor of St. Philip's was the only thing he ever asked for as a priest, and he certainly never regretted it.  Working surrounded by people, giving orders, creating things that show his taste – from buildings, to church décor, to liturgical services – brought him enormous satisfaction, and he devoted great energy to them and took great pride from them, even the 6:15 AM on weekdays, which he liked to call “Midnight Mass.”  He was also particularly compassionate with the sick and elderly – perhaps from being an only child – and he cheerfully carried the Blessed Sacrament to them in that big Buick, which I always thought of as The Monstrance.   

            At his Silver Jubilee in 1997, he said to you, his parishoners:  “I have often told you that I am an only child, so you all are my family.”  That was to prove true in the end, when it was not the cigarettes he was still smoking but the damage done his liver in the past by alcohol that came back as the cross.  The end was startlingly swift.  After tests and biopsies, on March 22, he got the definitive news:  both diseases; untreatable; two months.  It was to be less than two weeks.  He needed a family at that time – a family to do things we need done when we can no longer care for ourselves.  And he got one.  It was touching to see his secretary, Yvette (Ecuyer), become a sister – doing far more than she had interviewed for.  Louie stayed up with him several nights on end.  Brian (Florane) pitched in.  Last Wednesday morning, Lee's knees gave way under him – someone with height and strength was needed; Brett (Wright) had stopped in to work on the patio, and he was still there, in the same clothes, when the end came, a day and a half later.  There were probably others, but these are the ones I saw.  They represented all of you in proving that, in this case, water – maybe baptismal water – was as thick as blood.  His nurse, Johanna, from Hospice was especially savvy with him, as were the sitters from R and R.  (I can only imagine what Lee's comment on that agency's name would have been.)

            Lee summoned me to Ochsner's the day he got the news.  He had not yet grasped it fully – “I'm still in la-la land,” he said.  But he began making the decisions he knew he had to make.  He asked me to preach at his funeral; over  the next few days, he and Louie (Dupuy) planned this service.  He wanted a coffin from the Abbey, but was afraid he couldn't get one:  “Maybe I could get a cross with a coffin attached to it,” he told Louie.

            If he withdrew during those last days, it was because he didn't know what to say to people.  Tuesday of last week was far worse than Monday – but far better than Wednesday.  On that Tuesday, Yvette passed on a voicemail message asking him to call back.  Lee said of the caller, “He and I have been friends over 40 years, but I just don't know what to say.”  Later, I thought I should tell Lee, “Maybe he has something to say to you.”  I didn't get the chance.  He appreciated the cards, the messages, the flowers, and especially the prayers; he just didn't have the space to figure out how to respond.

            He was very happy and relieved that Archbishop Aymond was appointing Bishop Carmon to administer the parish.  He was able to relax that the people he loved so much and the ministry he loved so much were in the hands of someone he, and his parishoners, esteem so highly – and someone tall enough to wear all those vestments.

            Lee went into the hospital on Ash Wednesday.  He died on Thursday after the Third Sunday of Lent.  When we were at St. Ben's, every night at supper we used to hear a commentary by Dr. Pius Parsch read on the next day's liturgy.  Of the Thursday after the Third Sunday of Lent he wrote:  “This is the twentieth of the forty fast days before Easter, the midpoint of Lent.”  Lee was able to do something many of us have wished we could do:  he cut Lent in half!  He went straight to the Paschal Feast – straight through the veil into that sanctuary not made by hands – more beautiful than any church on earth (it had better be!) – to stand beside the One Priest, and to offer his life, his ministry, his suffering, his death – and his sin – in union with that One Sacrifice.  We, here below, do for Lee the last things we can do – the only things we can now do – for someone we love:  we honor his cancer-wasted body with Christian burial, and we pray for him – in the sure hope that he too continues praying for us.

            I can't resist letting Lee have the last word.  When we were college freshmen, some Brothers came to St. Ben's whose apostolate was to care for Catholic cemeteries.  They came to move the remains of the Benedictine sisters from the abbey cemetery to the sisters' new cemetery at St. Scholastica Priory.  Within the routine of seminary life, this qualified as an EVENT, so an after-dinner stroll that just happened to pass the cemetery seemed in order.  As we approached, three brothers could be seen working.  Lee quickly named them “Brother Mortuus, Brother Defunctus, and Brother Spes Resurrectionis.”  That comes to “Brother Dead, Brother Deceased, and Brother Hope of the Resurrection.”  (It loses something in translation.)  But, if the truest things are often said in jest, then it was  characteristic of Lee to make, in jest, his profession of faith.  Lee, it's to that third brother, Brother Spes Resurrectionis, that we commend you now.  You aren't an only child after all.

Aelred Kavanagh, O.S.B.