Memorial Mass for Bro. Eugenio De Lorenzo

Memorial Mass for
Bro. Eugenio De Lorenzo, CFC

Sept. 21, 2021
Wis 3: 1-6, 9
Ps 63: 1-5, 7-8
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Home, New Rochelle, N.Y.

“The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God” (Wis 3: 1).

Bro. Gene’s life, like all our lives, was a testimony to our dependence on God—ideally, lives of total dependence on him.  Most of us fall a bit short of that totality at which our profession aims, and that’s why we pray for our deceased, even the best of our brothers.

But by God’s grace—“grace and mercy are with his elect” (3:9)—we do live as tho our souls—our lives—are in God’s hands.  That’s our public witness before the Church and before the world.  We testify as religious that God’s “faithful shall abide with him in love” (3:9)—in a loving community of brothers around our Lord Jesus, and in an eternal life with Jesus, a life which we imagine as a banquet, a great, big, unending party.  And the master of those servants “will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them” (Luke 12:37).

Here below, we thirst for God, our flesh faints for him (Ps 63:2).  That longing is our hope.  Today we pray that Gene’s longing has been fulfilled, that his flesh is incorporate with our risen Savior, that his soul and his entire self is fully satisfied as with a rich feast (63:6).