The Founder

Homily given at Fr. Bob’s Funeral Mass

By Bishop Scott McCaig, CC

Dear Archbishop López Quintana, who represents his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Archbishop Prendergast, Archbishop Gervais, all priests and religious, especially my brother Companions of the Cross and our sisters, the Servants of the Cross, our Lay Associates and all the faithful: I would like to thank you all for being here today. We are more grateful than we could ever hope to express.

Though Father Bob has been very ill and steadily declining for some time and though we are relieved and grateful to see that the sufferings he has endured these last years are finally at an end – It is still a very bittersweet moment. Today we are commending into God’s loving embrace a man and a priest who has done enormous good for Christ and his Church.

He was a driving force of renewal, a leader of the Marian movement, a much sought-after speaker and teacher especially in matters pertaining to Church renewal and the renewal of the priesthood, and a pioneer both of the New Pentecost in our time and of the New Evangelization. He yearned wholeheartedly to see the Catholic Church, the Church he loved with every fiber of his being, come fully alive to Jesus, living and vibrant. And he extended himself completely, even at the price of his own health, to see it realized.

To the Companions of the Cross and the Servants of the Cross and to our many Lay Associates, he was and remains our spiritual father in Christ, the one who handed on to us the vision and the mission of renewal that God has planted in his heart: a vision for renewal empowered by a meaningful common life and spirituality. He was and remains for us a deeply cherished brother and friend.

And to countless others, he was a gifted teacher, pastor, coach, a fiery preacher who set hearts on fire for the Lord, a gentle (one could even say tender) fatherly presence, who was always available, it seemed, with a listening ear and a compassionate heart, someone who always remembered your name and what mattered to you, who made you feel special, who had an uncanny way of speaking affirmation and healing into hearts, someone who taught us how to take God very seriously but not to take ourselves too seriously. His proper full name of course was Reverent Robert Joseph Bedard. But to us, to all of us, he was Father Bob. And somehow that just seems to say it all.

His impact was amazing and incredibly far-reaching. I have met people as far away as East Africa who heard a tape, found an article, read a book; lives were changed as a result. To say that he will be and has already been deeply, deeply missed doesn’t begin to sum it up.

Now, there are few things that bothered Father Bob more than funeral homilies that really were, as he used to say, “just hasty beatifications.” And I remember him saying, in a way that only he could, that when his time came, he wanted everyone to sing and to praise the Lord… To pray his sorry self out of purgatory… and above all he wanted the Gospel proclaimed. Wanting to be faithful to his wishes and also because I don’t want to face him raising that enormous questioning eyebrow towards me when we do finally meet again, I will try my best. But I want to do so by highlighting some of the truths that characterized his own ministry and his own experience of the Lord.

Father Bob believed with an impassioned conviction that Jesus Christ is not just some remote historical figure but that he truly, truly is Risen from the dead! That he is the Lord of the Church and of all creation. That he is Alive and that he is on the move, not just 2000 years ago but here, now, today! This means that he can be known and loved. To Father Bob, this was the greatest treasure of his life and he wanted everyone to share it. He once wrote the following: “We have been tantalized by Jesus. We have been fascinated by him, dazzled. We have been trapped and captured. We are prisoners of the Lord. But we are delighted to be in his custody. We would not want it any other way. We are able to say with St. Paul “that we have reappraised all else as rubbish in the light of knowing Christ Jesus, that we are now racing to capture the prize for which he has captured us” (Phil 3:12).

Father Bob was convinced that the Lord Jesus wanted nothing more than to reveal himself to each and every one of us in the Holy Spirit. To really capture our hearts and to draw us into an intimate, personal, loving relationship with himself. He yearns to awaken us, to give us new life, to transform us and to mobilize us for his own mission.

Jesus, still reconciling the world to the Father, has plans–Father Bob would tell us again and again–plans for the Church, yes, but also for every parish, every community, every family, every diocese and each and every one of us–personally. He often quoted the Lord speaking through the prophet Jeremiah: “I know the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord. Plans for peace and not for woe. If you seek me, you will find me. If you seek me with your whole heart, I will let you find me” (Jeremiah 29:13). To Father Bob, there was only one sane response to this living, loving, Lord Jesus–complete surrender. He said this in as many creative ways as one could possibly imagine. Not only that we should consciously, deliberately, surrender to Jesus but he called us to… “Give the Lord the red carpet,” “the green light,” “the white flag of surrender.” He encouraged people to make what he called “the offer”: “Whatever you want me to do, Lord, I will do it.” And perhaps most memorably, he called everyone to do what the Lord had taught him to do, give God permission! Yes, permission… permission to do with us, or with anything for that matter, whatever he wanted, because he respects our freedom and he wants that permission.

He would often say that “the will of God is the only thing worth doing.” And that we need to trust the Lord and follow him even when we don’t completely understand because he loves us. And it is inconceivable, it is impossible, that he could ever lead us astray. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and he is more invested in our own happiness that we are ourselves. And not just in eternity but for the fullness of life even here and now. “We need to make him Lord of our lives,” he would say, “Lord of everything: our relationships, our families, our job, our money (yes that too), our time, everything.” And if we do this, we will never regret it. Oh, he might mess up our perfectly laid plans but as Father Bob would say again and again, “We will be glad… We will be glad that he did.” He might do things that we never expected or imagined, but eventually, we will thank him for it. Father Bob used to say that when we let the Lord take over, hang on! Because he is the Lord of the unexpected, the God of surprises.

He had a deep and tender devotion to Mary. To him she was, and I quote him: “that little something extra that God gives to those to whom he has already given everything”; but even his devotion to her was firmly rooted in surrender to Jesus. To Father Bob, Mary was summed up in her exhortation at Cana, “Do whatever he tells you.” Mary was for him the model of Christian discipleship precisely because she was perfectly surrendered to her Son, and because she shows us how to do the same.

One of the best lessons I ever had about being a disciple of Jesus was watching Father Bob very early, morning after morning, walk into the chapel, bow his head right to the ground before our Lord’s Eucharistic presence, and quietly say under his breath, “Not ready, Lord, but willing.” He knew he wasn’t equal to the tasks before him, but he trusted with unshakable faith that Jesus would give him everything he needed to do whatever he asked. “Not ready, Lord, but willing” and he really meant it. He used to say that he would even push a peanut down Bank Street with his nose if that’s what the Lord asked him to do. If that would bring glory to God and save souls, he would do it. I thought of that often, visiting Father Bob in the hospital and nursing home these last thirty-three months, wracked with dementia, seizures, Miller-Fisher syndrome, brain trauma, heart arrhythmia, sleep apnea, and a host of other symptoms. And he never complained… Not once.

He had offered the Lord all his suffering for this community and for its mission of evangelization, and it seems that the Lord in his love used Father Bob for souls right to the very end. He never did roll that peanut down Bank Street, but he did live out in his own flesh a depth of love and surrender equal to any that I have ever seen. One of the things that he never tired of reminding us as priests and seminarians was that surrender didn’t only apply to the laity: it applied to us in a particular way. The Lord wants to run his Church! He wants to be consulted! Over and over again he would tell it to us this way, “We should seek the Lord’s word relentlessly and make no major moves without it, no exceptions.” We had to learn to wait upon the Lord, to see what he was doing and support it. He drilled into us the idea that while there are many good things to do, it is God’s things that will make the difference. In other words, that our ministry had to be rooted in seeking, hearing, responding, and following the Lord’s will. For Father Bob discipleship and leadership could not mean anything less than total surrender. “Just make the offer”, he would say, “and don’t worry, the Lord will help you live it out.”

To Father Bob it was always the Cross that was at the center of this wonderful adventure in Christ. Christ Crucified was the Power and the Wisdom of God. As Jesus hung upon the Cross his infinite power revealed in his mercy, washing away our sins, conquering the enemy, restoring us in love to the Father, his infinite wisdom revealed as the logic of love, an unconditional, foolish love, a love that could not bear to be separated from us. These are truths that Father Bob never tired of proclaiming. It used to literally drive him crazy that anyone could have attended a Catholic school or sat in the pews every Sunday their whole lives and still not really heard and personally received the startling Good News that God loves them – unconditionally – in fact that he was crazy about them. And that this was the whole reason that Jesus died on the Cross, to save them, to set them free so that they could say “yes” to him, receive him and accept him, so that they could love God as Father here in this life and forever. But he also insisted that Christ Crucified, the Power and Wisdom of God wasn’t just something 2000 years ago. Christ Crucified remains the Power and Wisdom of God in a living way here and now. Christ crucified with the scars still in his hands and feet and side, is truly Risen, alive, reigning as Lord, and he still gives us his Wisdom.

First and foremost he gives us his general Wisdom through sacred Scripture and Tradition under the guidance of the Magisterium, of course, but he also gives us his particular Wisdom, he speaks directly into our hearts, into our circumstances, into our lives, to give us his “now word”, to guide us day to day as a true loving Shepherd. Father Bob taught us to ask the Lord everything, to seek his Wisdom, to wait upon it with discernment, and with determination to carry it out no matter what it was. And our Lord still gives us power through the Holy Spirit. Father Bob believed unapologetically in the full testimony of the Scriptures on this point. He believed passionately along with the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council that “God distributes gifts and charisms to all the faithful of every rank, for the upbuilding of the Church.”

It was something he experienced in his own life through the grace of the ‘Baptism of the Holy Spirit’ in 1975 and he said it was “the watershed experience of his whole life.” He wholeheartedly agreed with Pope Paul VI who called this tremendous grace in our time a “chance for the Church,” with Blessed Pope John Paul II who called this outpouring of the Holy Spirit “a revolution of Christian living… Of the living expression of the faith.” He wanted everyone to know what Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, had identified as God’s answer to the prayer and the plea of Blessed John XXIII at the convocation, the beginning of the Second Vatican Council: “Send upon us O Lord, as at the beginning, a New Pentecost in our time.” To receive this for Father Bob was just another aspect of full surrender, of letting God be God. And he wanted everyone to experience the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, the joy of a life renewed, and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit through the wonderful and diverse array of charisms. He would often say that the Lord sits very reluctantly on the sidelines of our lives… Instead, he wants to be running the game… Calling the plays… And leading us to victory every step of the way. He wants to lead us, disciple us, and empower us to do everything that he is asking of us.

And finally, this vision of a responsive relationship with the living Lord Jesus was for Father Bob the very heart of the mission of the whole Church. In 1975 after his own personal Pentecost, he read Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation on evangelization, and he said it completely changed his priesthood. It changed his priorities. It changed his homilies. It changed his manner of ministering. He understood in a new way the priority and the urgency of evangelization. He became, I believe, attuned in his heart to the infinite love of God, with a burning desire for everyone to come to the knowledge of the truth and to be saved. This same zeal for souls burned hot in the heart of Father Bob Bedard. Proclaiming in a simple way the basic Gospel message was his priority always, in a way that people could understand, in a way that was attractive so that people would understand how much God loves them, so they could open their hearts to receive this gift of Jesus to eternal life. And he saw that when people responded positively to the Lord and opened their hearts to him, the Holy Spirit backed it up: he moved in with conviction, love and transforming grace. And as Father Bob would point out, “Then our catechesis makes sense… Then people are willing to hear… Then they are asking the questions that we are trying to answer… Then the sacraments will have their full effect… Then there will be encounters with the Lord… Then there will be true worship of the Lord and communion with Jesus.” For him it was very simple, and it was the heart of everything that mattered.

It became his consuming passion to see Jesus known and to see Jesus loved. He used to say that he loved being a priest and the thing he loved most is that we are in a privileged position of seeing God work. And he would say that there is nothing more wonderful in the whole world than watching God go to work, to see someone come alive in the Lord. And so he believed that this was the key to the success of the whole Church’s mission. Only a renewed people can renew the church. Only a people on fire, can spread the fire. Only a people in love, in love with the Lord, can be vessels of his infinite love to the world and this is exactly what the world most desperately needs.

There is so much more that I could say and probably should say, but I see by my watch that I have the charism of Father Bob in speaking long as well… But I think this is the essence of what I think he would want me to say, and this is, I believe, the essential witness and the patrimony that he leaves us. And I pray that we are able to honour him and give glory to God by living it faithfully and generously.

I would just like to conclude then where I began, in commending Father Bob to the Lord. We give him back to the Lord with hearts filled with gratitude and love and with great confidence, not because Father Bob was without spot or wrinkle, he wasn’t, as none of us are except for the Blessed Virgin. But he was very quick to point out his own failures and struggles, often right in his homilies in the most humorous and self-effacing ways, and somehow in a way that gave us permission to be real too. They gave us permission to be still striving for that fullness that the Lord wanted for us. No, we have confidence because the Lord is all love and mercy and Father Bob was all his. One of Father Bob’s favorite Scriptures was 2 Chronicles 16:9, “The eyes of the Lord roam over all the earth to find those who are wholehearted for Him, so that He may raise them up.”

I believe that the Lord found just such a man in our beloved Father Bob.

Thank you Lord Jesus for the life, the friendship and the fatherhood of this beautiful man. Thank you Lord Jesus for this faithful servant of the Gospel. Amen.