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June 20, 2014
By Father Bob Pagliari, C.Ss.R
Even when he was just a seventeen- year-old youth, William Smith demonstrated an extraordinary carriage of confidence and, as he himself admits, expressed his first declaration of freedom: “I went to see Father Raymond Schantz and said, ‘I have decided to become a brother.’ I was accepted for the next entrance class but never told my parents until a week before I was to leave for Ephrata, Pa. They didn’t object. They supported my decision.”
That was then. Now our Redemptorist brother, Martin de Porres Smith, has died peacefully in the Hospice Unit of Saint John Neumann Residence at Stella Maris in Timonium, Maryland, on June 18. He was one month shy of his seventy-fourth birthday. And so he is free at last from the debilitating illness which succeeded in holding his body captive for many years, but never, even for one moment, managed to weary his blest spirit or dampen his joyful soul.
Read or download Brother Martin’s full obituary here.