Memorial Day honors the best America has to offer — and helps define what heroes are.
We are amazed by those who die for their country because they have made a sacrifice we couldn’t or wouldn’t make, their love was able to set partisanship and personal preference aside to a rare degree, and because they mastered virtues most of us lack.
Here are three Catholic Memorial Day heroes who died, or were honored, this year.
We dream of having the discipline and self-possession that made Reymund Transfiguracion a hero.
Army Special Forces Sgt. 1st Class Reymund Transfiguracion is one of the many immigrants who move to America, love their new country, and then give their lives for it.
He died last August at age 36 from wounds inflicted by an Improvised Explosive Device in Afghanistan. His wife, Edelyn, and his children, Ella and Rylan, mourned him at his funeral Mass at St. Michael of the Archangel Church in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
He was born in the Philippines in 1982 and worked on his family farm producing coffee beans and macadamia nuts. “We had nothing,” his brother said. But Reymund did have a Green Berets poster to hang on his wall.
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