Nóra Quoirin was a special bearer of the Holy Spirit and gifted others with immeasurable love and joy, the priest celebrating her funeral Mass said this week.
15-year-old Nóra, who had special needs, went missing during a family holiday in Malaysia last month, with her body being found after a 10-day search. Local police said she probably died of starvation and stress while lost in the jungle.
Speaking at the Mass in Belfast’s St Brigid’s Church, where Nóra had been baptised, Fr Eddie O’Donnell highlighted Nóra’s “gentleness and her innocence”.
“She, as we all know, depended greatly on others but, Nóra in turn, gifted others with immeasurable love and joy; before such an ability we can only feel gratitude,” he said.
Sympathy
Describing those gathered at the Mass as united “in wordless sympathy for Nóra’s family”, Fr O’Donnell said he had been asking himself what was the meaning of Nora’s tragic death.
“We know that God did not intervene to save his own Son from a cruel and apparently pointless death,” he said. “Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and the friends of Jesus who stood with her beneath the Cross, were just as devastated as Meabh and Sebastien and their family are today. But Jesus’ trust was not in vain; he was not abandoned to death, nor his mother and friends to desolation. Neither does God abandon us.
“The resurrection is God’s assurance that death does not have the last word,” Fr O’Donnell said.
