Requiescat In Pace . . . Catholic Physician James Asher Dies, Laid To Rest November 22
By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Usually a motorcycle or three waiting in the church parking lot for a funeral are the regular escorts for a hearse going to the cemetery. But as the casket with the body of James Asher, D.O., headed to the National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona, north of Phoenix, about a dozen motorcyclists betokened both his love of riding ’cycles and his military service.
As a veteran of both the U.S. Marines (captain) and U.S. Army (colonel), Asher had his funeral procession fittingly accompanied by the Arizona Patriot Guard Riders, an association that sees servicemen to their resting place, on November 22. Asher received a military gun salute before his modest wood casket was lowered into the grave on a day with the high temperature in the lower 80s.
His body was clad in his bemedaled Army uniform, with the medical caduceus on the lapels.
Over the last few years The Wanderer published both some articles written by Asher, and also news quotations from him, concerning medicine and the Catholic Church’s moral teachings about life, then this newspaper ran occasional reflections on his approaching death as the reoccurrence of Asher’s pancreatic cancer was discovered just over a year ago.
These reflections appeared under the standing headline, “Thoughts on my summons — A retired Catholic physician contemplates dying.” Also, I wrote of visiting Jim at his home as he continued to grow weaker. We talked of his appetite problems, blood pressure, and how much longer God wanted him to endure. He wasn’t expecting a miracle of healing.
At the foot of his bed was a monitor where he could see family photos scroll by and also watch Mass. Beyond this was a sunny back yard. He perked up when we talked politics on September 18, but by October 25 he looked very tired and weak. Rose, his wife, noted that the feast days of All Saints and All Souls would be here as November began. He died on October 30.
His funeral Mass at Sts. Simon and Jude Cathedral here was celebrated by Fr. John T. Hannigan, Jr., previously a chaplain at the Phoenix VA Medical Center, one of Asher’s work sites, before the priest retired and moved to Illinois.
Hannigan said, “Jim used his God-given gifts to the fullest,” including playing the piano and organ at the VA chapel, as well as writing for The Wanderer and Phoenix diocesan Catholic Sun newspaper.
Although people didn’t sit shoulder-to-shoulder in the cathedral pews as they could have before the pandemic, hundreds of mourners filled the building seating from front to back.
Mrs. Asher told me the funeral was a few weeks after death in order for the military to arrange its ceremony while the priest made travel plans back to Arizona.
Asher had a master’s degree in bioethics, was a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus, worked at the charitable Phoenix Mission of Mercy clinic, and was with the U.S. Public Health Service’s Phoenix Indian Health Center. He also founded the Men’s Program for the other parent in a family at Phoenix’s pro-life First Way Pregnancy Center, to guide new fathers in their responsibilities.
Born in January 1942 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Asher spent some of his life in San Diego, Milwaukee, Omaha, and Phoenix. He and his wife had seven children, 15 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. In addition to his medical profession, Asher loved the Church, pro-life, the outdoors, writing, playing music, family and charities.
Amid this host of interests, Asher was healthy at age 75 when pancreatic cancer was discovered. After expeditious surgery just before Thanksgiving 2017, he took about a year of recovery to feel back up to speed.
But two years after that, just before Thanksgiving 2020, the cancer had returned, and he was estimated to have less than a year to live. He almost made that year, passing away on October 30.
Amid the tributes at the website of A.L. Moore-Grimshaw Mortuaries Bethany Chapel was this one by niece Merri Fitzpatrick about her uncle’s motorcycling over to San Diego to climb a mountain: “Although he lived in Phoenix, there was always a special place in his heart for San Diego. I remember he would come down to Grandma Doris’ house and hike Cowles Mountain at sunrise.
M“That means he would leave Phoenix around 11 p.m. on his bike and ride through the desert into the night. He would get to San Diego around 4 a.m. and start his hike. I remember thinking at first it was crazy! But after seeing him do this time and time again, I realized it didn’t exhaust him, it exhilarated him,” she wrote. “He found freedom on the open road and he loved the ride.
“I also believe that seeing his mother, Doris, made him feel grounded. You could see how close they were and they had a very special relationship,” she wrote. “After his hike they would spend time talking, eating, laughing, and playing the piano. He was the only one who could jam on the piano just like her.”
Asher was an officer of the Catholic Medical Association of Phoenix and longed to see the day when Catholic physicians’ guilds around the nation returned to their former glory. The issue of artificial contraception, he would tell people, had torn them apart.
In addition to its annual White Mass and dinner, the Phoenix guild was having luncheon meetings with speakers, then the COVID-19 pandemic shut them down. As recent years passed, Wanderer articles reported these events.
Shortly before that virus shock, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke spoke at its White Mass and dinner on October 19, 2019, where Asher received its annual St. Luke’s Award “for upholding the principles of the Catholic faith in the science and practice of medicine.” St. Luke is the patron of physicians.
In his homily for that White Mass, Burke said, “Satan’s principal temptation is discouragement and self-pity. When we see, with honesty, the ferocity with which the secularized culture advances its agenda against human life and its cradle in marriage and the family,” the temptation is to feel overwhelmed.
However, the cardinal said as he expanded his remarks in his keynote address after the dinner, faithful Catholics can provide direction and hope to their “brothers and sisters” in society lost in an “unreal world of moral relativism.”
Two years earlier, both Asher and nun-physician Sr. Mary Diana Dreger, MD, of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, Nashville, spoke at the Phoenix guild’s 2017 dinner.
Although Donald Trump had upset expectations by defeating pro-abortion Democrat Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, Asher warned the 2017 dinner, “I believe it would be prudent to regard what happened as a respite, not a solution to the growing threats against our faith, morals, and consciences.
“We thus have been given an opportunity to gain strength for the onslaught that is surely being prepared, and surely on the way,” Asher added.
He told the diners there’s a “solid reason why I believe these threats [to conscience] will not go away” — the willingness of too many Catholic medical practitioners to acquiesce in “this ever-growing culture of death….
“We live in confusing times within the Church, but we must not model our lives nor our practices after those claiming to be Catholic who nevertheless routinely cooperate with evil, basking in what appears to be ecclesiastical impunity,” Asher said. “God is merciful, but He is not stupid.”
What words of prophecy when Joe Biden no longer served as Barack Obama’s toadying vice president.
Dreger, the nun-physician, said that seeing medicine as a calling or vocation could protect against physician burnout. If one decides to “leave everything else behind” and “write the Lord a blank check with your life” to do “whatever He wants,” this advances not only the good of others but practitioners’ “own personal good,” Dreger said.
In 2021 I saw some of Asher’s grandkids passing time in his kitchen as he lay ill in bed, just as I had seen when the grandmother of a different family was dying of cancer at her home in 2007. The older generation departs the scene for the younger one.
Quite apart from any political considerations, the body of the late U.S. Sen. John McCain in 2018 was brought to the same mortuary as Asher’s, but a mortuary worker told me the McCain family had only a private viewing there before his public ceremonies.
One more little note. In late 2019, when I was in a three-story physical-therapy home for a serious back injury, a healthy Jim would come by to bring me the Eucharist. Directly across the hall from me was an artist named Leo, who was released to go home before I did.
When I was searching online obituaries in early November 2021 for Jim’s name, who should I find but Leo, who died at almost the very same time as my Eucharist-bearer. The future is known but to God.