On Friday in New York City, family and friends — including National Review staff and subscribers — celebrated the life of Faith Abbott McFadden. McFadden was the widow of James P. McFadden, once an NR assistant publisher, who founded Human Life Review. She took up his mantle after he died in 1998, but finally succumbed to cancer herself at the end of August.

I remember Faith here, dipping a little into her beautiful memoir, Acts of Faith, published by Ignatius Press.

If you are not a reader of The Human Life Review, take a look at its website. Faith’s daughter, Maria, is editor there now.

Below the fold, the text of Fr. George W. Rutler’s sermon at her funeral Mass:

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Requiem Mass Sept 2, 2011 Church of St. Agnes for Faith Abbot Mc Fadden
In the commerce of any day, there are three words that give pause and strike speech silent. A human curtain is pulled back, the cynicism that hardens feeling cracks, when someone, anyone, says three words: “My mother died.” If cried by a stunned child for whom the world was like a womb, or if they come from a youth who thought he had outgrown the need of a mother, or if they are whispered by a grown man who was always a little boy in the memory of one woman, those three words stop the moment’s noise for more than a moment. There is no easy protocol or adequate etiquette in reply, when someone says, “My mother died.”
One sorrow Our Lord was spared by the mercy of his Divine Father was the loss of his own mother. When she endured the contradiction of a mother losing her son, He made that abandonment an endowment to all who would accept his gift : “Mother behold your son. Son behold your mother.” In the sacrifice on the Cross, Christ gave mankind His mother and in doing He gave us His body the Church, just as His physical body came into the world through her.
All faithful mothers bring human life closer to the mystery of eternal life by nurturing it first in the flesh and then in the Spirit. There never was a true mother who was not a good teacher, and the Church in her prophetic role teaches her children mysteries which by their very nature are beyond our invention. So it was one Christmas Eve in Paris when the great writer Paul Claudel, only eighteen years old but his sense of God already dry and he thought dead, happened into the Cathedral of Notre Dame. He knew some biology and anthropology and theology, but he needed a higher teacher to bring them all together. During the singing of the Magnificat he was transformed and his embrace of God at that moment was never loosened. Later he wrote, “When Paul spoke to me, and Augustine made things clear to me, and Gregory broke bread for me with antiphon and response, the eyes of Mary above me were there to explain it all to me.”
Today the Holy Mass is offered for the repose of the soul of a mother of sons and daughters who loved her who loved them, and who spread that maternal bond to many others whom she instructed in the ways of God by writing and by the example of her life which is the most eloquent literature written on the heart. When her beloved husband James was called from this world, she took up his mantle and now we are left with the impossible task of counting how many of the least little ones, even unborn lives, she defended by her witness to the sacredness of every human life. That witness engaged the most important struggle of our age, defending life in a culture of death.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln received Harriet Beecher Stowe in the White House. The President looked down from his height of six feet and four inches at the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” who was four feet tall. The account says that he feigned surprise and then said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Faith Abbot McFadden, wife, mother, grandmother, author and friend, did not start any war but she fought well in the fierce contest between the truth of life and all the lies against it. That is a hard task because this world is hard, and she made it seem easy by ready wit, not disdaining even that most disdained form of humor, the pun. Wise men have believed that there are even divine puns which we pass off as coincidences but which are acts of providence. To play with words is tribute to the Living Word who plays in the world he made. Such conscious humor is not the vaudeville bravado of those who “laugh so as not to cry.” It is a descant on love, not sentimentality, which gives hope, not vague optimism, and which in turn is founded on the first virtuous gift of faith. Faith was named for faith in baptism, and the way she lived made real that precise definition given by God’s lively oracle: “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)” Faith. It is by the lives we live that what we hope for becomes a fact and what is invisible becomes clear.
Prayers for those who have died, offered in faith and hope and love, cannot be less than joyful because of the promise of eternal life, but as that joy is from a larger world, it strains those left in this smaller world to the point of tears. Christ who wept for Lazarus and for the whole city of Jerusalem, understands human sadness at earthly partings. When he preached in Galilee the crowds wanted him to stay in their villages, and when he rose from the dead, the men on the Emmaus road, not knowing yet who he was or where he was going, were moved enough to say, “Mane nobiscum,” Stay with us. In each instance he did not stay, for he had to move on according to the will of the One who sent him, and as he moves on through the centuries, he gathers the generations one by one and those in them each by each and takes them along with him. We are left for a little while longer, to walk where he walked on the paths of this earth, and to serve him as those who have gone before us served him as best they could with what they had. And all the while as we walk we pray for the faithful departed among whom now is Faith: “But thanks be to God, who hath given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.(1 Cor. 15:57)”