J. Roland E. Ramirez

On April 16, 2014. Age 89. Son of the late Arturo Ramirez Pinto and Felisa de Leon. Beloved husband of Constance (Deucher); beloved father of Mary Ramirez (Alex Humes), Joseph (Nancy Joll), and John (Michele Bertocci); grandfather of Nicholas, Xavier, and Maia; brother of Raul Paniagua and the late Arthur and Ricardo Ramirez. He was born in Los Angeles, CA on March 19, 1925, and spent his formative years in Guatemala, Central America, and in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, LA. During WW II, he served in the Naval Air Corps in the Pacific. He was sent to pilot training, but left the Navy at the end of the war to attend the University of Notre Dame. After completing his undergraduate studies in 1950, he spent the next five years abroad, studying and traveling. He earned the MA degree in 1951 from Le Saulchoir Paris, and then hitchhiked from Paris to the Middle East. Over the span of the next two years he visited Greece, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iran and then made his way to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. To earn money for his return to France, he taught English for several months at a school in Mosul, Iraq. Following completion of Ph.D. studies in spring 1955 at the Catholic University of Paris (L'Institut Catholique), he was briefly employed as a Latin tutor for a family in Philippeville, Algeria, and there witnessed the onset of the French-Algerian War. In early 1956 he returned to the U.S., and to a faculty position at Duquesne University, where he became professor of philosophy and taught for the next fifty years, specializing in the works of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and in Asian philosophy. He never lost his passion for travel, and his journeys took him to such destinations as China, Japan, and other parts of the Far East, the former Soviet Union, South America, the Galapagos and Easter Island. Family and friends will be received at the Freyvogel-Slater Funeral Home, 112 Fort Couch Rd., Pittsburgh, 15241, tel. 412-835-1860. Visitation on Monday, April 21, from 6-8 p.m. and on Tuesday, April 22, from 1-3 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. Mass of Christian Burial at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, April 23, at St. Thomas More Church, 126 Fort Couch Rd., tel. 412-833-0031. Interment at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies. Memorial contributions may be sent to the Philosophy Dept., Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh 15282, and to Catholic Relief Services, P.O. Box 17090, Baltimore, MD 21297.