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Eulogy for Joan Koloze

Eulogy for Joan Koloze

(presented at her funeral Mass at Holy Name Church, Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday, 13 May 2025)

This is the most difficult speech I have ever given in my life.

First, however, thank you, Monsignor Richard Antall, for celebrating this funeral Mass for Joan.  Joan and I greatly respect you for being not only an author and scholar, but also, more importantly, a magnificent priest for our Church: humble, orthodox, witty, and utterly compassionate.  I also appreciate that Fr. Thomas Haren, in residence at St. Michael’s Church in Independence, Fr. John Mullee, pastor of St. Monica’s Church in Garfield Heights, and Fr. Tony Schuerger, in residence here at Holy Name, are concelebrating this Mass.  Final thanks to Molly Grunau, Music and Liturgy Director at St. Monica’s Church, for fulfilling Joan’s one demand to have Gounod’s Ave Maria played at her funeral Mass.

Like many of you, I feel cheated.  People live well into their nineties now, so having Joan die at age 73 seems an utter tragedy.  The Morris family, her brothers and sisters, could have had twenty more years of a sister whom they revered and loved.

Our four children are cheated of having Mom physically present at our boisterous dinners, our holyday and holiday gatherings, and our celebrations of various landmarks in life: anniversaries, baptisms, birthday parties, First Communions, Confirmations, special meals to celebrate career successes, and weddings.

And then I think of the grandkids who could have had Grandma present for the next twenty years.  Grandma will not physically be there at your graduation from high school or college, your weddings, your ordinations to the priesthood, your entrance into religious life, or the many milestones of your lives.

Thinking like this could make us all extremely sad.

But then, as Psalm 30, verse 5 affirms, “At nightfall, weeping enters in, but with the dawn, rejoicing”, just like the Crucifixion on Good Friday and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, despite feeling cheated, I know that it is better for Joan to be in the hands of God.  Remember: God never allows an evil thing to happen without a greater good in mind.  Now, for Joan, there is no more heart failure, no more kidney disease, no more twenty-five pills every day, no more insulin, no more seemingly weekly doctors’ appointments, no more this, no more that.

Joan’s life was much more than any illness she may have had.  Her IQ was extremely high; she was a contender for a Rotary Scholarship to study in Ireland.  She graduated magna cum laude from Ursuline College and formally obtained half a Master’s degree in Education; all of her post-graduate work would have constituted a completed master’s degree, if not placing her well into a doctorate.  She was a Catholic schoolteacher for nearly forty years.  She could have made much more money trying to teach in a public school, but she chose Catholic schools because she wanted to transmit our Catholic Faith to little children.  Maybe that’s why her peers elected her in 2002 as Outstanding Teacher of the Year at Saints Peter and Paul School.  Leaving teaching, Joan chose to devote herself to married life, raising a family, and volunteering for the pro-life movement.  She was the treasurer for a pro-life political action committee for many years here in metropolitan Cleveland.

If the Vatican were to ask me to testify someday at her cause for canonization, I would point out that Joan was a victim soul, someone who offered up every suffering she had so that others would be spared anxiety or pain and thus achieve their academic or career goals.  Joan offered her sufferings for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her children, her grandchildren, for me, and, most especially, for the Right-to-Life movement.

Above all, however, when Joan is officially canonized someday, she will be made a saint because she greatly loved her family.  Her death doesn’t stop that love, just as God’s love didn’t stop at the Crucifixion.  No one can stop God’s love; that’s why we have Easter.

And, if that is true, then no one can stop Joan’s love.  Therefore…

Children of the original Six Kolozes, Greg, Mary, Ann, and Tony: Mom loves you.

Our sons-in-law Scott Nolan and Brian Buckingham and our daughter-in-law Dr. Barb Koloze: Mom loves you.

Grandchildren of the Nolan family, Luke, Dominic, Claire, Rose, and Lucy: Grandma loves you.

Grandchildren of the Buckingham family, Hannah and John: Grandma loves you.  Since Mary Grace is only two months old, I ask her guardian angel to tell her someday that Grandma loves her.

Grandchildren of the Koloze family, Aurea and Aidan: Grandma K loves you.

Over the past four months, when God was preparing both Joan and me for her transition to eternal life, three lines from Gladys Knight songs kept coming to my mind, songs that both of us appreciated because we sang them on every road trip to visit the children and grandchildren.  The three lines are: “Neither one of us wants to be the first to say goodbye”, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me”, and “Farewell, my love.  Goodbye”.

Joan, neither one of us wanted to be the first to say goodbye in this, the last period of our married lives, but I want everyone to know that you were and are the best thing that ever happened to me.  We have known each other for one and a half years as boyfriend and girlfriend, which began at the first pro-life workshop we attended, then another year and a half as an engaged couple, and then forty-three and a half years in marriage.  We have blessed God with our four living children and our two babies lost by miscarriage, Michael or Elizabeth and Patrick, both of whom you are now seeing again.

I would change the last line of the song I have in mind.  Instead of “goodbye”, I would say, “Until we meet again, I am certain that God is holding you in the palm of His hand.  Farewell, my love”.

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Thanksgiving to God Day 2023

Happy Thanksgiving to God Day 2023…

…despite the best efforts of pro-abortion zealots, Antifa domestic terrorists, Hamas terrorists, and the abortion business Planned Parenthood (virtually the same things, right?), we pro-life civil rights activists give thanks every day to God for the essential gift of life.

THAT’S something that a pro-abortion puppet like the criminal Joe Biden can NEVER say.

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Tracking the extremist Ohio abortion ballot initiative

Civil rights/pro-life activists:

You can follow the progress on defeating the extremist abortion proposal to Ohio’s constitution here:

https://www.ohiolife.org/ballotinitiative

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Translation: abortion clinics are in it for the money.

Well, well…what have we here?  Evidence that pro-life pregnancy support clinics help women more than abortion clinics, which, like Planned Parenthood, promote abortion because of the $$$ they make off women.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pregnancy-centers-offer-better-service-than-abortion-facilities-a-new-study-shows/

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Video of activity of an unborn person

These are the unborn people—human beings like you and me—whom the violently pro-abortion Joe Biden, the Satanic Temple, and the Democratic Party/DNC (forgive me for being redundant) want to kill.

Thank God there’s a pro-life movement to counter this violation of human rights!

Always remember: abortion harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers.

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An American nightmare ended

The death of a nation’s nightmare

is cause enough to celebrate,

especially if it wasted

forty-nine years of the culture.

Irrational Roe is damned by Dobbs.

Let every prolifer rejoice!

The refused and voiceless unborn child

is vibrant with his or her voice.

And we in this prolife nation

are binding the demons of choice

and voting red in elation.

6 July 2022

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A warning bell about Catholic academics

Dr. Stephen Sammut isn’t writing an essay as much as he is furiously ringing a warning bell about Catholic academics.  The embedded links citing those “Catholic scholars” who urged people to reject pro-life candidate Donald Trump and then pro-life President Donald Trump shocked me.

Such great names!  “Scholars” trying to confuse Catholics into…what?…either staying away from voting or, worse, voting for anti-life Joe Biden, who claims to be Catholic on social justice issues but is just an ordinary abortion zealot?  It’s bad enough that most people despise academics for their race-baiting leftist ideologies (critical race theory) or for their just plain ignorant ideas (white privilege).  That Catholic institutions, apparently, lack the courage to fight—and fight hard—for our Catholic values is discouraging.

Worst of all, when we, sinners though we are, want to support our Catholic institutions and learn that those institutions are no better than any secular community college, college, or university, then to whom can we donate our pro-life money?  If there is no Catholic college or university worthy enough to receive our pro-life dollars, then, absent having the power of a college president or the power of being on a college’s board of directors, there is only one course of action faithful Catholics can take to rectify the problem: we just won’t donate to them.

Let me say that louder, in the way that our young people would on social media:

We.  Just.  Won’t.  Donate.  To.  Them.

Maybe that is the only language that will work to encourage Catholic institutions to stand up in the fight against leftist secular attacks on human life and on our Faith: money.

I have this idea of choking off money from Catholic institutions which lack courage to defend life and morals because I was about to donate again to what many call one of the few genuine and orthodox Catholic institutions to praise it for its good work.  Now, I’m not so certain, and there will be no electronic donation coming out of my checking account to that institution.  Right-to-life groups will get it instead.

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Welcome!

Welcome to the website of Dr. Jeff Koloze (PhD, English, Kent State University), which will maintain archived material and current research on the issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in literature.