It is with sadness that we note, on this Sunday, and the memorial of the patron saint of priests, the passing into eternity of Father Leo Ramsperger, who died last Friday, August 2nd, the commemoration of the Portiuncula, we may add, at the venerable age of 100, and a priest for 70 years. Very few reach the first, and far fewer the second. The only other I can recall is Father Leo’s good friend and fellow priest, Monsignor Vincent Foy, the great champion of Humanae Vitae (and foe of the disastrous Winnipeg Statement).
I knew Father Leo personally, attending many of his Masses in his private chapel at his home in Maynooth, where he had retired after a long life of priestly service, and driving him numerous to his eye appointments in Toronto, where he had to have an injection in his eye, to help mitigate his macular degeneration, which rendered him almost blind. But he kept saying Mass right up to the end (he had memorized almost all of the common prayers and the Roman canon). Father Leo was of the ‘old school’, and had no time for modernism, liberalism, and various other ‘isms’ that had infected even the bosom of Holy Mother Church, whose teachings and practices he defended to his last breath.
He kept his large garden – replete with fish pond! – into his nineties, and he loved to spray fish food on the surface and watch the fish jump. We would talk of all sorts of things, but mainly of the Church, and education, and the old days – and he recalled far older days than this relative youngster. As one of his friends wrote to me when she told me the news, ‘he was a shining light’. Just so. We need more such lights, and may God raise up many more men in the mold of Father Leo to continue His work for the salvation of souls.
The funeral Mass will be this Tuesday, August 6th (feast of the Transfiguration) at Saint Ignatius church, Maynooth, at 2 pm, with visitation at 1 pm beforehand, with another Mass yet to be arranged at Saint Vincent de Paul church in Roncesvalles, Toronto.
℣. Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine
℟. Et lux perpetua luceat ei:
℣. Requiescat in pace.
℟. Amen.
Father Leo Ramsperger’s full obituary may be found here.