More on Fr. Bob Bedard

Here's an excerpt of the piece I did on Fr. Bob Bedard after his death:

At the time the hockey-loving teenager thought he would become a dentist. But a few months later he heard a homily that convinced him he needed to spend the rest of his life making clear to people the reality of the Scripture verse: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own immortal soul?”

MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION

“That’s got to be the most important question in the world,” he said to himself. “I don’t think most people know that. They go on with their lives as if nothing is going to happen.”

It was then he knew he was going to become a priest.

Ordained in 1955, he worked in a downtown parish for three years before the archbishop asked him to teach at the new St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary. It was supposed to help young Catholics cultivate vocations, but Bedard found himself frustrated that most of his students would shed their Catholic faith “like a sweater” once they graduated.

Though the school grew from 35 students to a Catholic high school of almost 800, nothing he or the other priests tried seemed to work to evangelize the otherwise polite and attentive students.

In the mid-1970s, Bedard began meeting people whose lives had been turned around through their encounter with the charismatic movement.

He decided to check it out. At a Catholic church, he found the chairs arranged in concentric circles with the leaders in the centre, singing “peppy songs like Jingle Bells, not terribly profound music.”

‘CATHOLICS DON’T DO THAT’

When the music stopped and everyone began praying at once, he thought, “That’s a curious way of praying. Surely they could get together on this.”

It bothered him when people began to pray with their hands raised in the air. “Catholics don’t do that.”

When people began to pray for intentions, he was struck that some requests seemed “so small, so picayune, too small to bother God” about. One woman prayed about renting her spare room and he wondered why she wouldn’t just put an ad in the paper.

After he left, he thought “these people are crazy, the Canadian society of ding-dongs.”

CREDIBLE PEOPLE

But he kept meeting solid, credible people whose lives had been profoundly changed for the better so he went back. He signed up for a Life in the Spirit seminar and eventually prayed with others to receive one of the spiritual gifts. Instead of asking for one of them, he asked to be able to pray.

After being prayed for, Bedard felt disappointed because nothing dramatic happened. Instead, he went home and had a deep sleep. But he awoke the next morning with a desire to pray that he had never experienced before.

The Bible started to make sense in a new way. While praying his daily offices in the Breviary, “the words started to jump off the page to me as if somebody was passing a magnifying glass over them.”

He found new power to evangelize, and began to see his 18-year-old students transform “right before my eyes.” They formed prayer groups. People began to experience healing.