Valedictory talk for our Founder in name of Prayer and Word Community

On behalf of the whole Prayer and Word Community, Ivica Lulic, Director of the General Management, delivered the following eulogy at the funeral of the Community’s Founder:

Dear friends,

Our dear Presbyter, Founder, Professor,

We are very grateful for the gift of your life and priesthood.

You gave your everything for us: your time, your talents and your vocation. The house in which you lived was our house too. So much happened there: many vigils, your fasting, discussions, prayers and religious classes.            

You gave generously and helped us while we were entering into life. So many late night discussions will stay with us forever. You prepared us for life decisions such as getting married and choosing a vocation. You were looking forward to our successes and encouraged us to become what we yearned to become. With you, each and every one of us became important and valuable.

For everything you received from Jesus (the entire treasure of the Church, foundation of faith, holy orders, etc.) you would often tell us: „It is all for you“. The same goes for your knowledge acquired diligently and all the deep experiences of God’s closeness, which make a priesthood authentic and fruitful.

Your constant yearning to explore and discover the laws of the Creator registered in reality and man’s spiritual soul helped to understand every human being.

Since you were interested in who man is and what his spiritual structure is (existence), you gathered valuable information from the Revelation and the Magisterium as well as from the contemporary scientific discoveries. You bestowed on us unspeakable magnificent realities about the secret of man created in the image of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit through books, radio and TV shows, evangelization seminars, numerous spiritual retreats for priests, laymen and members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard. You travelled the world to make Christians alive again through the New Evangelization and to all the people you brought the Good News that God is only Love and that Jesus is the Savior of every person.

And when you explained all this with a latitude that Jesus had, some may have not understood that the spiritual soul in every person is the creation of the Father, that Jesus saves it and that the Holy Spirit enables us to perceive it and accept it as a deep experience. The Holy Spirit forms the real image of God the Father and Jesus from Nazareth, the only friend of man.

From you we also learned that the Spirit makes man capable of always carrying out new tasks. I will always remember how you used to say: „My time is at the disposal of my Boss/Jesus; I never work alone“.

Your greatness is in defending the personhood of man in the Church and society until the end.

You taught us and we learned from you not to defend what is sinful in us but to opt for the good and to convert again looking at what we can become.

We are grateful that you, as no one else in the Church of our time, formed us as laymen and renewed us with the Power from above and that you travelled so much because of us. You were not afraid of any class of people anywhere in the world; you went to the doctors, professors, business people, students, married couples, refugees and wounded people. You did all this out of Jesus’ love in you for the world.

You loved the Church immensely and were very demanding toward us as collaborators in evangelization and hagiotherapy, so much so that many even said that it was too demanding to do it. However, we would like to cordially thank you for that because today we live and testify the power of the Spirit, which is in the foundations of our vocation and mission around the world. We participate in the apostolate of the New Evangelization and hagiotherapy, which heals man’s spiritual soul, that is, it heals a brokenhearted person wounded in conscience, mind, freedom and personality.

The best way to thank you for that is to drink from the same Source, that is, to receive Love from it and bring it to man, to people – our brothers!

Two months before you passed away, you formed the charism of the Prayer and Word Community and you wrote the Rule of the Community, in the foundations of which is your life, testimony, love for man and complete love toward the Church, which is the visible body of Jesus Christ. I remember you telling us to connect with priests because we cannot go on alone.

Thank you for your humanity and the beauty of your priesthood.

Our changed and saved lives thank heaven and earth for you.

I believe and we know that you will advocate for all of us from heaven.