Jesus is there. "He is our religion.... Hold onto him. Believe in him. Never let him slip out of your life."
These are some of the final words of a 92-year-old priest which have emerged in a remarkable video recording made of him shortly before his death earlier this year.
In the video, published this month, Father Ed Thompson, a friend of the late Fulton Sheen, a popular Catholic bishop and broadcaster who many are hoping will be canonised, describes his six decades in the priesthood, including his recovery from alcoholism after years battling the disease.
Thompson was born an identical twin, eight minutes before his brother David, who also became a priest, and he died in February at 92, the oldest active priest in Orlando, Florida.
The video was made by his friend Brandon Vogt to preserve the memory of his ministry for future generations.
At one point he was even kicked out of active ministry until he sobered up and turned his life around.
His father was a travelling salesman. His mother, of Irish origin, was advised to abort the twins to avoid contracting rheumatoid arthritis. She did contract it after they were born, but also lived to her nineties.
Thompson tells how he experienced his vocation to be a priest from the age of about 11 but went on to date girls in high school and go to dances. He even had a steady girlfriend at one point and went out to work.
But he finally told his parents he wanted to be a Catholic priest, even though his parents said they wanted him to go back to work because they needed the money.
His parish backed his parents but eventually he realised he was just being "tested".
He finally entered St Charles Seminary in Philadelphia. "I never wanted to be anything else than a Catholic priest and it's still there after 63 years."
During his ministry he once had Mother Teresa preaching in his parish. He was vocations director of the diocese and then became a parish priest in Philadelphia in 1974. "But I had a problem. It was drinking problem. I was a real, live alcoholic. "
He lasted just one year in the parish.
"I was so sick and so ashamed that after a year, I just left the parish." He went to work in a cemetery in Florida. Finally he asked his brother for help, who told him: "Edward, you're an alcoholic. And you're a liar."
In the video, Father Ed continues: "Alcoholics when they are drinking cannot tell the truth. They can't survive telling the truth."
So he joined Alcoholics Anonymous but it took him a few years to get properly sober.
He spent a year in rehabilitation in a religious house where his job was to feed slop to the pigs.
A bishop in Nevada gave him the chance to be a priest again. He celebrated by drinking Scotch. A year later he was found out. In the next 15 years as a priest in Nevada, he went into treatment three times until the money ran out and the church finally told him he was on his own.
Then a friend wrote and asked him to get in touch. It was a woman he had helped 30 years before when she wanted to become a nun. She said: "Jesus Christ told me you were in trouble and I was to help you." In July 1991 he moved into her home in Florida, where he shared a room with four cats and worked as her cleaner and fetching her groceries. He was allowed to say Mass – but only to himself and with the cats.
He moved from there to a studio flat, got another job in a parish as a lecter and doing other jobs done by the laity. Eventually the Bishop of Reno in Las Vegas let him become a priest again at St Mary Magdalene parish where he remained for 23 years.
"Dear folks, if there's one thing I want to say to you before I go into the next world, it would be this. Whatever you do, hold onto Jesus Christ in the most Holy Eucharist, Holy Communion. He is there. He is our religion.... Hold onto him. Believe in him. Never let him slip out of your life."
