In Memoriam
The latest issue of Pluscarden Benedictines, always readable, reprints Bishop Hugh‘s homily at the requiem for Fr Maurus twenty years ago, after he disappeared mysteriously. It is a beautiful, affectionate, shrewd re-reading of a remarkable life that blessed countless people. Who was Fr Maurus? An ‘energetic, self-possessed, single-minded, masterful man, sometimes severe, often hilarious, detached and so warm, rough and gruff but capable of heart-rending kindness, full of himself but never selfish, full of Christ, full of Mary, full of the Bible, full of stories, often frustrated, always content, silent and full of pithy, punchy words that went to your heart, sometimes uncannily perceptive, always with a mystery to him’ – above all one ‘visibly outstandingly faithful to prayer’. His disappearance after years of dementia, ‘already a form of disappearance’, was somehow characteristic: ‘He once said to me, I hate goodbyes’. ‘Fr Maurus, loyal as he was, was always bigger than what he did, more than what made him. He had prayed and built this community for 58 years, it was time to go to God.’ Requiescat!
