Cokie Roberts’ funeral: ‘She called us to be our better selves’

Archbishop Wilton Gregory was the celebrant and homilist and, watching video of the event, I saw a few familiar faces in the congregation.

The video below contains the entire liturgy — from “Amazing Grace” through “Ave Maria,” “On Eagles’ Wings” and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

The Catholic Standard’s Mark Zimmerman has these details: 

Noted broadcast journalist and author Cokie Roberts was remembered as a Washington icon, a national treasure, and a woman devoted to her family and her faith, as luminaries from the worlds of media and politics joined friends and admirers at her Sept. 21 Mass of Christian Burial at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in the nation’s capital.

Roberts, who had breast cancer, died on Sept. 17 in Washington at the age of 75.

“We give thanks for the time that Cokie Roberts graced this world of ours,” Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory, the principal celebrant of the Mass, said in his homily. “We rejoice in her humor, her conviction of faith, and her womanly ability to bring out the best in us – and to insist on nothing less. Thanks be to God for the time that He gave her to us.”

The mourners at the Mass included Sam Donaldson, with whom she anchored ABC News “This Week” from 1996 to 2002; former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw; and Bob Schieffer, the retired longtime anchor of CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” which like Roberts’ program aired on Sunday mornings.

Just as her family was central to Cokie Roberts’ life, they played a central role at the Funeral Mass, with her husband Steven Roberts offering a heartfelt remembrance after Communion. Their daughter Rebecca Boggs Roberts read the first reading from Ecclesiastes, and their son Lee Harriss Roberts read the second reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians. And Cokie and Steven Roberts’ six grandchildren offered prayer intentions…

 

…The offertory gifts at the Mass were brought to the altar by members of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, the congregation that taught Cokie Roberts, a New Orleans native who attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart in that city and who graduated from the order’s Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1960. Over the years, Roberts supported Stone Ridge in many ways, speaking at the school, attending Masses there and serving as an honorary chair of the largest fundraising campaign in the school’s history.

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