Mr. Speaker, last Sunday, over 1,500 people gathered at the Saint-Robert-Bellarmin church in Rimouski to pay their final respects to Monsignor Pierre-André Fournier, Archbishop of Rimouski and president of the Assembly of Quebec Catholic Bishops, who died suddenly on January 10.
Although he was the Archbishop of Rimouski for just six years, he loved his adoptive community and region deeply, and was so beloved in return by the people of his diocese that one would have thought he had been archbishop there for 60 years.
Humble and genuine, he was so approachable and so close to people that many of his friends called him PAF, after his initials. He had a gift for making every person he spoke to feel that he or she was the most important person in the world to him at that moment. He spent countless hours with the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalized, exemplifying his episcopal motto, “Blessed are the poor.”
He gave generously of himself. Rarely did he turn down an invitation from his community, be it to a community supper or a meeting to stand up for what mattered to the region.
As one person in the enormous crowd of people who attended the funeral called out, “Thank you, PAF”, not just for everything you did, but also for everything you were.