Funeral + Rev. John Wagner

Died on Sunday, St. Patrick’s Day

Happy Easter to you all.

“The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want,” we heard sang today for Reverend John Francis Wagner, a pastor, who died on St Patrick’s day, also a shepherd. Not that he was heavily devoted to St Patrick, that I know of, but that comforts me.

The only thing I remember about his being 1/2 Irish, he went with his mom to a liturgy, at Grace Episcopalian Cathedral in San Francisco. The liturgy was perfect, and synchronized and beautiful, which John appreciated, and he asked his mom, “Why aren’t we Episcopalian?” and she said “Oh honey, because we’re poor Irish!”

He mostly talked about how he was German and organized, but he was also a son of St. Patrick.

What also comforts me is that he died on was that it was a Sunday, and John believes in the Resurrection, fitting to have his funeral during the Octave of Easter.

Sunday was a day he had worked so much and he was taken early in the morning as if God were saying “you don’t have to wake up for Mass anymore, my priest son. I’ll send someone else to do the Mass.” I think the last few weeks are some of the only weeks in his life when he didn’t have one or two Sunday masses, at least. He is one of those worker priests saying 4-5 Masses for many years on a Sunday. Most of his assignments in this diocese were by himself and I thank Mnsr Weber for being a faithful friend and living with him at different places while working at the Diocese to assist on Sundays. He told me that he never had an associate until Fr. Manny came in Temecula, which was around his 31st year as a pastor, first at St Charles Borromeo in Bloomington, then at Saint Matthews in my hometown of Corona, and lastly here at Saint Catherine’s.

John 14:1-6 Christ the builder of a house, the bridegroom priest, John the builder of houses.

Regarding the Gospel, Christ says “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be”Jn 14:3.

Christ is a King bridegroom, the New Solomon, and he goes away to build a house, and he is talking to his friends who are guys, individually they’re men, but together they’re the Church which is feminine. So Christ speaks in this nuptial way of building a house which is part of his Father’s house, as the bridegroom.

Mary implies the same thing when she tells Jesus to provide the wine, because He’s the bridegroom.

Herod wanted to be accepted as King of Judea so he repaired the temple.

As priests, we live in the dual reality, one that yes, we are part of the Church, Christ is our bridegroom too, but as priests we act in the person of Christ! By acting in the bridegroom’s stead, he provided not only the Eucharistic Chalice and the Gospel message, but also homes to at least three of the churches here in the diocese, St. Charles, St. Matthew’s, and here, adding buildings, paying off halls, tithing to other parishes needing to build: Mother Teresa’s, St. Martha’s, Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mecca, and from his own money the new parish in Wildomar, St. Frances of Rome. John was very generous and so we have him to thank in a lot of ways, and others of his ilk like Bishop Straling and Bishop Barnes getting this Diocese built and moving as well as the San Diego bishops that governed this territory before the split.

John preferred to work on choral pieces with his choirs and write homilies, but he was asked to build and He imitated Christ doing it, not that he wanted to but that’s what was asked of him. There’s a lesson in obedience there for all of us. My generation is so fond of the question, “But what about me? what about what I want?”

So he imitated Christ the Tekton, the carpenter… but he also imitated Christ the bridegroom who sings to His bride the Church. He loved music, and he introduced me to beautiful and historical works of art. I don’t think I had a chance to hear his music, but he always talked about it to me with a twinkle in his eye, “you know that’s the thing with priesthood, you must find purpose!” He found it in music, not in building, but whenever the bishop asked him to go somewhere or build he would say OK “and you watch there will be no debt afterwards,” he’s always proud of that fact.

He was always proud of building the Religious Education Building that cost <$1.5 million that increased because of the Olympics in China, 2008, “when the costs rose 300%, to >$4 million I raised the money and even had a surplus of $40,000 left over!”

One of my first attempts at preaching here as an intern was on the Widow’s mite, so instead of using it as a situation to ask for money I said, “God doesn’t really want your money, he wants you!” As a battle worn and now retired pastor he came up to me after Mass, and said, “Ian, fine homily, great points, but just a little tip from an old timer, never tell the people that you don’t want their money!”

So I am grateful to John and to all the priests of this diocese who have built homes for us to worship in, who have acted in the place of Christ the King and builder.

Wisdom 3 & Ecclesiastes 3:3-11

Now, besides having sufficient money, and running parish day to day activities and figuring out where he was going to lunch at, Fr. John did have an eternal outlook. I think he chose today’s first reading because of this line:

Wisdom 3:2,4 They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead…but They are in peace, For to others they seem punished, yet is their hope full of immortality.

And this is true about John, that while he was declining, it wasn’t fun or glorious, it wasn’t beautiful, but John believed in the Risen Christ, which is one of the reasons why John didn’t need to try every type of treatment for a little bit more time here.

What is this hope for immortality but what we also read in Ecclesiastes,

11 God has made everything appropriate to its time, but has put the timeless into their hearts

Why is it that we don’t want to die? This is something that Fr. John taught me … because we weren’t made to! We were born into a temporal world but with the “timeless in our hearts!” “with a hope in Christ that is full of immortality.” We were born with original sin, but that’s why Christ came, to become sin that we might live, or as we just heard in the Easter Vigil Exultet:

Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed.

O love, O charity beyond all telling,

to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!

Very often John would start crying as he would explain theological points like this to me, and I think it hit him later in life, saying, “Don’t you see what our faith is? How great our hope?! Do you see what I’m saying?!”

Friendship

One of the aspects of timelessness is relationships. The friendships that we invest in now are not wasted, and in heaven will be enjoyed forever. Friendship is not a waste of time. And John would invest in friends, in his employees and his priest friends and lay friends, his sister, Joann Marie, his niece and nephew, Laura Ann, and Jeffrey. This man who was short tempered, trusted the people around him, and they trusted him, and he wouldn’t write people off even after a bad first impression. And he was a father who took care of those under him, like the his deacons and wives present here today. This is why Fr. Timothy and Emmy spent the last weeks with him and looked after his affairs. This is why Fr. Anthony Dao kept him tied into the parish and his employees like Eugene, Mia, and Sharla took care of him.

The 2nd reading of today’s Mass, St. John the beloved gets this point across very well: 1 John 3:14 

“We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. Whoever does not love remains in death...16 The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”

At the Last Supper Christ Himself says the same thing, John 15:12-13,15

This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends…I no longer call you slaves… I call you friends.

The key point that Fr. John taught me, and I will now close but direct this towards the priests, because it is of utmost importance to us. In the same way that if mom and dad are fighting in the home, the home will not be in peace…if the fathers who are looking after a parish aren’t friends, and this also extends to the presbyterate working with the bishop, then how can we ask our parishioners to fulfill the Gospel mandate to love one another as friends?

When Fr. John was in bad shape, years ago and sobering up after his bout with alcohol, he said it was the Irish priests, those whom he had previously resented because of their own ways and alcoholism, who took care of him, who understood what he was going through. The love of priests saved John and taught him a lesson that he would live out. He was always good to priests, unless they were arrogant! He was generous with me and with many of you, he would ask Bishop Barnes to host the priest convocation dinner and was happy to do it! Many of you faithful who are present were probably asked to assist at it, and you imitated his love for priests. I am still surprised to know who John’s priests friends are: (Fr Timothy Do, Manny, Don) Fr. Luis Guido, Fr. Peter Pham, Fr. Kien Ku, Ciro Libanati, Fr. Santos Ortega, longtime friend Mnsr. Ray Kirk, of course Fr. Ned Brockhaus from San Diego, the newly ordained Bishop Michael Pham from San Diego, here present, Bishop David Antonio from the Phillipines, the late Fr. Jeff Conway from Stanton Island that he met in rehab, Fr Gino Galley and Fr Alex Rodarte, Fr. Johnny Dang; Fr. Javier Gonzales, Fr. Erik Esparza and Fr. Jorge Garcia were always spoken of fondly. In a diocese so diverse as ours Fr. John got over the little annoyances that keep us from interacting with one another.

He said he told his first associate and his interns, “We have to risk being friends, we have to risk the Gospel. You have to trust that I will not screw you over.” And with that he avoided doing that deadly thing that we all do with one another, compare ourselves to one another, which only breeds envy or contempt. If his team was doing a good job he would say, “Well that’s great! I want you to be creative, use your talents that God gave you!”

He embodied that filial line from St. Gregory Nazianzen that is read on the feast day of Basil and Gregory, “Our love for each other grew daily warmer and deeper. The same hope inspired us: the pursuit of learning. This is an ambition especially subject to envy. Yet between us there was no envy. On the contrary, we made capital out of our rivalry. Our rivalry consisted, not in seeking the first place for oneself but in yielding it to the other, for we each looked on the other’s success as his own.”

Thank you Fr. John for being our friend.

Thank you Christ for risking such a friendship with us!