“Our issues this Sunday…”

With these four words, Tim Russert greeted millions of viewers each Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press for over 16 years.

Sadly, Mr. Russert collapsed on June 13, 2008, and died of a massive heart attack.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus recently shared his thoughts:

The outpouring of tributes to Tim Russert on his death at age 58 was both surprising and well deserved. There was a palpable sense of guilt in the many descriptions of him by his colleagues in the commentariat. They frequently seemed to be saying that he was such a genuine human being uncompromised by stardom when the rest of them, having achieved only a small measure of his success, had become phonies of one kind of another. True, there were a few curmudgeons, such as Michael Kinsley, who accused Russert of “downward social climbing,” of playing the good ol’ boy shtick for all it was worth. As the show business adage has it, Once you’ve learned to fake sincerity, the rest comes easy. I don’t believe that about Tim Russert.

Indeed, Jon Meacham, who knew Mr. Russert well, summarized it well when he said that “Russert was one of the least self-important people in the capital.” Mr. Meacham is an Episcopalian and vestryman of the St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, New York City, but seems to have an excellent understanding of how Mr. Russert was influenced and shaped by the 1950s Catholic culture of rust-belt Buffalo, New York:

It is not sentimental to say that Russert’s rise and reign can be best understood in the context of his religion, for his religion was not just a part of his life but his whole life, and his story is a common one for ethnic Roman Catholics of his generation.

To be a certain kind of Catholic in America in the years between, say, the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the election of Richard Nixon (to date it in a way Russert would have liked) was to be immersed not only in a faith but in a consuming culture. Protestants talked about “going to church.” Catholics spoke of “the Church.” Life revolved around sacraments and the schools, priests and nuns. One Christmas season I asked Russert how much of his childhood had resembled the movie Going My Way. “Just about all of it,” he replied.

Growing up on Kirkwood Drive in Buffalo, “Timmy” Russert attended mass at St. Bonaventure’s, where he also went to school. “In the altar-boy world, he was the No. 1 server,” recalled Patrick J. Griffin, a neighbor. “They always gave Timmy the prime mass. He got the 10 o’clock mass on a Sunday; we got the 6 o’clock mass on a Sunday. He was a cute little fellow, blond hair and blue eyes, and everybody liked him.”

There were crosses above the Russert kids’ beds, a portrait of Jesus and his Sacred Heart on the wall and a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the backyard; in May, the month of Mary, the family lit a candle every day. There was no meat on Fridays, and if someone lost something, Mrs. Russert prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron of lost things. On Good Friday they re-enacted the Stations of the Cross. (”I remember, in seventh grade, kneeling in church from noon to three as a form of sacrifice,” Russert recalled in his memoir, Big Russ & Me. “It wasn’t easy.”) In second grade came first communion and the perils of the confessional. The priest’s face was hidden by a screen, and Russert did his homework even then. “We always prepared for confession by thinking of various sins we might have committed,” he recalled, “such as being mean to your sister or the always available wildcard sin of ‘impure thoughts’.” The rhythms and rituals of the church—communion, confession, absolution, catechism—were not exotic to Russert; they were givens, part of the air he breathed. …

He prepared for broadcasts the way he had prepared for mass back in his altar-boy days. “Part of your responsibility was to be punctual,” he wrote. Sometimes he had to go wake the assistant pastor, who liked his sleep; if Russert did not do what he was supposed to do, the service would not happen. “It all seemed so natural then, but when I look back on it, I’m struck by how much responsibility we had,” he wrote. “We weren’t even in high school yet, but age-old traditions with great meaning depended on our showing up on time and doing the job exactly right.”

Fr. Neuhaus continues,

These themes are evident in the book dedicated to his father, Big Russ and Me: Fathers and Sons, Lessons of Life. I ran into Russert and his father one day, and the latter told me, “He makes me look better than I am.” He really seemed to mean it and to be embarrassed about it. That, too, reflects a part of the Catholic culture with which Russert kept faith. …

From his Catholic faith and from Big Russ, Tim Russert learned the “lessons of life” that enabled him, and can help the rest of us, to survive the follies of life with a measure of equanimity and with uncompromised conviction. John Meacham writes that Russert believed that there are three really big things: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two surpass human understanding, so in our humbled state we should make the most of the third.

Meet the Press paid Mr. Russert a heart-felt tribute recently. The episode opens with the familiar opening fade-in of his (now empty) desk and chair.

To view and read more tributes, MSNBC has created a Remembering Tim Russert site.