Those are the words of Fr. George Butler, who administered the last rites of the Church on Thursday to one Richard John Neuhaus.
At age 72, the former Lutheran clergyman turned Catholic priest died after a short battle against the cancer with which he had been diagnosed in late 2008.
If you moved on after having caught a blurb of his passing on the TV news, or having seen a headline in a newspaper the past couple days, wondering why the big deal about a priest's death from cancer, you moved on too quickly.
This was not simply the death of your Average Joe after one of life's most common end games. This was, as Philadelphia's great newspaper The Bulletin called it, the loss of a "moral compass."
Fr. Neuhaus was one of the leading voices in the Church and in the country in defense of the millions of innocent children butchered each year in abortion procedures.
He was said to be an articulate defender of Catholic orthodoxy, and perhaps the leading conservative Catholic voice in the country.
Fr. Neuhaus also had a vision, the dream of many of today's Catholics, to see the Lord's Church whole again.
