Notre Dame law students, faculty and staff joined the family of Mosupatsela Karabo Vika Moleah to remember the life of the third-year law student with a memorial Mass in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on Tuesday afternoon. University President Fr. John Jenkins celebrated the Mass, and Fr. Bill Dailey, lecturer at Notre Dame Law School and rector of Stanford Hall, delivered the homily. The Notre Dame Liturgical Choir provided the music for the Mass.
Moleah died March 31 in Philadelphia, according to an email sent to students Friday afternoon from Vice President of Student Affairs Erin Hoffmann Harding. Moleah had been studying in the law school’s Washington D.C., program this semester but previously lived in the Fischer O’Hara Grace student community, according to the email.
In his homily, Dailey said gathering for an occasion of sorrow in a Basilica still decorated for Easter may seem incongruous.
“Indeed, gathering in these days of Eastertide, we may be in the best position to understand the hope God offers us, in sorrow,” he said.
The life of Christ “teaches us that our mourning matters,” Dailey said.
“We gather to mourn Karabo as a people commissioned by St. Peter to preach and to testify that Jesus is the one appointed by God, the one through whom God proclaimed peace,” he said. “... That this Jesus, the anointed and appointed one, wept, for even the master of history — whose death and resurrection are the very hinges of human history — paused at times and weeped.
“To believe in a Lord who weeps is to believe that our weeping matters. Because Karabo matters. Karabo’s life as a child of God, as a child of his parents, as a brother, as a friend matters, deeply. Not even because, in the words of his friends, he may have been ‘the most interesting man in the world’ … but because as human, he was made in the image and likeness of God, and that made him very good, indeed.”
Dailey said Moleah has been remembered by his friends as “never satisfied by the superficial or simple.”
“His questions probed, his presence affirmed, even his joking popped. Gifted with great wit and intelligence, he worked to make other people feel special. Gifted with eloquence, he was one who listened intensely,” he said. “His travels, his interests, his engagement made those around him care more about life itself, which perhaps makes mourning his death so deeply painful.”
Dailey said the days leading up to Easter in Holy Week serve as a reminder that the path to salvation is the way of the cross, but “we do not mourn, we do not weep alone.”
“So here we gather, as a people who weep, in this glorious building decked out for Easter joy, dedicated to the God who has wept with us,” he said. “These days leading us to Easter joy reminded us that Jesus himself did not claim that human joy comes lightly or simply.”
