Msgr. Ratermann is a Saint Louis priest missionary, serving in Bolivia since 1956, and is a founder of the Latin America Apostolate.

This morning I was vested and in church and just beginning to celebrate the morning Mass.  At that very moment a man and a woman approached me and asked me to go to a wake and pray with them for the woman’s brother, who had died and will be buried this afternoon.  (When people die, they have to be buried within 24 hours.  They do not embalm as a rule and so the danger of infection is real.)  I asked them to please let me celebrate Mass and wait for me to come back within an hour or so and thus let me write down all the information in order to go there right after lunch.  They will be going to the cemetery at about 3 p.m.  They said okay and left, but they did not come back.  So, I said to myself, “What happened?”  Yet I have a pretty good idea as to what probably happened.  If you don’t say “YES” right away and, instead, ask people to return after awhile, they may very well interpret your reply as a way of putting you off without being what they would consider “totally rude and even brutal.”  So, they may very well figure that the priest really does not want to offer his services and just go ahead with the funeral without those services.  Fortunately, I did ask where the wake is being held and they mentioned an area near a movie house in a neighborhood close by.  So, I will go there this afternoon and look for the place (probably a private home) where the wake is being held.  Wish me luck.  I am sad that so often I say what I really have to say and want to do, and the people put a different interpretation on my words, because they are so accustomed to being refused in what they might think of as a somewhat indirect or a “nice way.”