Bishop Rueger has given us an example to follow

    Cleaning up with teenagers.
 Seeing that a “street woman” had a proper funeral.
        These were among stories of “Eager Rueger” that his friend Father Dennis J. O’Brien told at his wake service Friday night.
    After talking about Jesus embracing his mission to show God’s face to saint and sinner alike, Father O’Brien told stories.
    One was of a religious sister who asked second-graders to draw a religious picture. One boy said he was going to draw God. The sister said that would be hard, since people don’t know what God looks like.
    “Well, they will now,” replied the child.
    “That little boy … could easily have been George Rueger,” Father O’Brien said. “For 89 years George Rueger gave to us a clear picture” of what God is like.
He told about Father Rueger’s ministry as a priest, including being headmaster of Marian Central Catholic High School.
    “’Eager Rueger’ – that’s what the Marian girls called him,” he said. He’d bring them buckets of water and tell them to clean up.
    “He’d be right there with them, wiping down the tables,” Father O’Brien said.
    At St. Peter Parish in Worcester he’d rub elbows with those who most needed a friend. When a “street lady” he’d sit and talk with was brutally murdered, he saw to it that she had the finest funeral liturgy –  not unlike the one he is going to have tomorrow, Father O’Brien told wake attendees. He made sure all her priest friends concelebrated.
    As a bishop he went to each school, parish and back alley, Father O’Brien said.
    Like Jesus, he washed feet. Unlike Pilate, he did not wash his hands of his responsibility.
    “He has given us an example to follow,” Father O’Brien told listeners. “We must now take up the basin of water” and wash others’ feet. “He who was blessed was a blessing to us all and may we never forget the love he shared with all of us.”
(Photos by Rob Carlin)