{"id":7328,"date":"2004-05-07T00:03:38","date_gmt":"2004-05-07T00:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/death_comes_to_the_monsignor.html"},"modified":"2004-05-07T00:03:38","modified_gmt":"2004-05-07T00:03:38","slug":"death_comes_to_the_monsignor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/death_comes_to_the_monsignor.html","title":{"rendered":"Death Comes to the Monsignor"},"content":{"rendered":"

William McGurn reflects on the life and death of a priest<\/a><\/p>\n

Understandably, nonbelievers might find it a romantic idealization of pain and ugliness to extract any beauty from the drawn-out death inflicted on this gentle man–the chemo, the probes, the constant sickness and (perhaps worst of all) the boredom. The only answer is the one Tom would have given: He was consecrated to an idealized way of life. Dylan Thomas raged against the dying of the light. In Tom’s world, learning that he would greet his Maker carrying a cross was deemed a tremendous gift.<\/p>\n

Not least of this gift was something he had to learn during this illness: to let those he had served finally begin to serve him. A sister ever by his bedside. A nurse who gave her nights to his care so that others might sleep. Priest friends who had him hear their confessions to remind him that the potency of his vocation remained even as his body withered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William McGurn reflects on the life and death of a priest Understandably, nonbelievers might find it a romantic idealization of pain and ugliness to extract any beauty from the drawn-out death inflicted on this gentle man–the chemo, the probes, the constant sickness and (perhaps worst of all) the boredom. The only answer is the one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDeath Comes to the Monsignor - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/death_comes_to_the_monsignor.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Death Comes to the Monsignor - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"William McGurn reflects on the life and death of a priest Understandably, nonbelievers might find it a romantic idealization of pain and ugliness to extract any beauty from the drawn-out death inflicted on this gentle man–the chemo, the probes, the constant sickness and (perhaps worst of all) the boredom. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}