10A - M. Gregorio Street
Project 4, Quezon City

March 10, 1998

This is my testament.

I undersigned Bishop Emeritus Salvador L. Lazo born on May 1, 1918 at Santo Niño (Faire) Cagayan.

I declare further that I am a Catholic of Latin Rite, and manifest and express my formal will of having my religious funeral ceremonies according to the rite which is in the Roman missal before 1962, called the missal of St. Pius V, under the title [sic] of the Office of the Dead. 

I desire especially that the ceremony be celebrated at the church of Our Lady of Victories, #2 Cannon Road, New Manila, Quezon City, my body being present in this church; that the mass should be celebrated by a priest or a bishop of the Society of St Pius X, and the mass be followed by absolution and burial as is the custom.

Everything should be followed by the immemorial custom of the Catholic Church to which I belong. And I desire to be buried in the above mentioned church —Our Lady of Victories.

+Salvador L. Lazo

(signature of 4 witnesses)

...Bishop Lazo departed for eternity in the early hours of Monday, April 10. His mortal remains laid in state in full pontifical vestments in the provisional mortuary chapel set up in the parish hall of Our Lady of Victories. Bishop Fellay immediately arranged to travel to the Philippines for the funeral which was scheduled for Friday, April 14, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Bishop Lazo himself had directed that his Requiem Mass be celebrated at Our Lady of Victories Church [cf. his Will above] and that he be buried there. Day and night the faithful came to the mortuary chapel to pray for their beloved bishop. His family was represented in the person of one of his nieces. Several Novus Ordo priests came to pay their respects but none publicly assisted at Bishop Lazo's Pontifical Requiem Mass.

Bishop Lazo's body was solemnly borne into the church from the mortuary chapel.  Among the pallbearers was Dominador Jerusalem, the bishop's faithful personal assistant for many years.  In his sermon Bishop Fellay paid tribute to the great courage which Bishop Fellay had displayed in his return to Catholic Tradition and his great energy in publicly proclaiming the reasons for his conversion.  Bishop Fellay said that these special graces had come from Bishop Lazo's great fidelity to prayer and in particular to his daily Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament and devotion to our Blessed Lady.  When Bishop Lazo had traveled to Europe in 1996 to be present at the priestly ordinations in Econe, it is well known that he had made a special point of traveling to see the great Marian shrines in Europe, notably La Salette, Fatima, and Lourdes.

The five ceremonial absolutions at the casket administered only at Pontifical Requiems were given by Frs. Wailliez, Hughes, Egli, Griego, and finally by Bishop Fellay after the Pontifical Mass.  Then the bishop's coffin was interred within the church itself on the Gospel side of the altar between the First and Second Stations of the Way of the Cross.