A clampdown on increasingly varied uses for ashes
Ah, the Vatican, and god-botherers in general, inventing ridiculous intrusive rules based on their reality-defying beliefs, and then trying to insist that everyone obey them. Like the Vatican saying omg no you may not scatter someone’s ashes or fling them off the top of a building or put them on your bookshelf next to Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell. Why mayn’t I? Well because it gets death all wrong. The Vatican is the authority on death, as any fule kno. Death isn’t where you stop being alive and begin to decompose, it’s the gateway to eternal life dootdeedoo.
Strict new Vatican guidelines forbid a list of increasingly popular means of commemorating loved ones – from scattering ashes at sea to having them turned into jewellery or put in a locket – dismissing them as New Age practices and “pantheism”.
A formal instruction, approved by Pope Francis, even forbids Catholics [to keep] ashes in an urn at home, other than in “grave and exceptional cases”.
As if it’s any of their damn business. If people find it comforting to keep ashes at home, who is the Vatican to tell them not to? Mean bastards with stupid wrong ideas, that’s who.
The document issued by the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) claims many modern cremation practices increasingly reflect non-Christian ideas about “fusion with Mother Nature”.
In other words they’re a little closer to reality than Christian ideas are. There is no Mother Nature, but our bodies are material and part of nature, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is just talking the usual old nonsense.
For centuries the Catholic Church forbade cremation altogether, primarily because of the teaching that Christians will be raised from the grave ahead of the Day of Judgment.
The ban was finally lifted in 1963 in a landmark Vatican document which accepted that there were often pressing social and sanitary needs for cremation but urged Catholics to choose burial wherever possible.
That’s the ticket: split the difference! Baby Jesus can still raise a few cremated people, but if there are too many of them, Baby Jesus will simply not be able to get to them all before it’s time to feed the dog, so choose burial whenever possible. That all makes sense and hangs together.
The new guidance accepts cremation in principle but signals a clampdown on increasingly varied uses for ashes, insisting instead that they should only be kept in a “sacred place”, such as a cemetery.
“[The Church] cannot … condone attitudes or permit rites that involve erroneous ideas about death, such as considering death as the definitive annihilation of the person, or the moment of fusion with Mother Nature or the universe, or as a stage in the cycle of regeneration, or as the definitive liberation from the ‘prison’ of the body,” it argues.
Oh yes, it’s “erroneous” to consider death as the termination of the person, while it’s 100% accurate to consider death a ticket to Daddy God’s best parlor.
It goes on: “In order that every appearance of pantheism, naturalism or nihilism be avoided, it is not permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way, nor may they be preserved in mementos, pieces of jewellery or other objects.”
It then adds that if someone has asked for their ashes to be scattered “for reasons contrary to the Christian faith” then “a Christian funeral must be denied to that person”.
Mean bastards they are.
I do think it’s worth noting that the goal here is to get folks buried, or at a bare minimum, their ashes stored, in a Catholic cemetery, which of course means they pay out to the Catholic Church, which owns the grounds and the mausoleum.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind a compromise–can I get my ashes thrown in the Pope’s face?
Now they call it the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”, but it used to be the Inquisition.
Speaking of Bertrand Russell and ashes:
“St. Thomas Aquinas, the official philosopher of the Catholic Church, discussed lengthily and seriously a very grave problem, which, I fear, modern theologians unduly neglect. He imagines a cannibal who has never eaten anything but human flesh, and whose father and mother before him had like propensities. Every particle of his body belongs rightfully to someone else. We cannot suppose that those who have been eaten by cannibals are to go short through all eternity. But, if not, what is left for the cannibal? How is he to be properly roasted in hell, if all his body is restored to its original owners? This is a puzzling question, as the Saint rightly perceives.
In this connection the orthodox have a curious objection to cremation, which seems to show an insufficient realization of God’s omnipotence. It is thought that a body which has been burnt will be more difficult for Him to collect together again than one which has been put underground and transformed into worms. No doubt collecting the particles from the air and undoing the chemical work of combustion would be somewhat laborious, but it is surely blasphemous to suppose such a work impossible for the Deity. I conclude that the objection to cremation implies grave heresy. But I doubt whether my opinion will carry much weight with the orthodox.”
(Bertrand Russell: An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish)
I want a green burial myself, but I think this is kind of cool:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-future-of-death-could-be-a-shiny-cemetery-beneath-the-manhattan-bridge
Did… they just forbid getting closure?
Samantha, don’t you know once you get closure, you are no longer vulnerable? Closure is the one thing the church can’t stand because it releases you from their power. They prey on the vulnerable.
Lots of luck, Catholic church. I expect the parishioners will be about as concerned about these edicts as Catholic women are about the church’s ban on birth control.
And this from the church with a world-wide industry of Relic Kitsch?
There’s one Eastern European saint I remember a blurb about…she was martyred for refusing to worship an idol. So they put her bones inside a golden statue and set it up on an altar!
@7: And that’s the point, really (to me, anyways): Only Catholics have to worry about this, and then only those who retain sufficient attachment to the Church-as-such to want an official Catholic funeral, but apparently retain not so much attachment to the theological details. While acknowledging the distress this ruling will cause families in that position at a time of grief, I can’t help feeling that maybe they need to make up their minds: are they in or are they out?
I heard a radio piece a few years back about how increasing numbers of Quebeckers were going in for non-Church-approved burial practices (e.g. scattering ashes up at the family cottage and so on). They had some priest maundering about how awful it was that the survivors wouldn’t have a proper grave to visit to remember their loved one by. I thought: You pretentious git — how *dare* you presume to tell people how they will want to make their remembrance. Death rites are meaningful to the survivors, and the Church wants to continue to be the Arbiter of Meaning. They don’t like it that nominal Catholics are increasingly finding their preferred meanings elsewhere, leaving the Church (rightly) irrelevant.
Steve – I felt the same anger when I heard about the Catholic Church in Australia trying to clamp down on unorthodox choices of music. Apparently, Australian funerals had been getting too raucous for the Church’s tastes and were becoming “celebrations of life”. My first response was “How dare they”, the second was that the power they have is the power their followers give them. Maybe it’s not a bad thing if people realise that they don’t have to let a bunch of bastards dictate how they mark life’s milestones.
Myrhinne – that’s something I saw in my husband’s church (Anglican), both for weddings and funerals. I was actually quite relieved when the church refused to marry us because I had been divorced and refused to go through a purely symbolic change to an annulment (in the past, such would not be possible if your marriage yielded a child). We could choose our own music (Beatles, yeah!), write our own vows, and drop out all that stupid obey stuff without the church stomping its foot and throwing a temper tantrum and insisting on having it their way. A wedding, the priest assured us, should not be about the bride and groom, but about Jesus, and nothing we do should upstage Jesus and draw attention to us instead. WTF? I said no, and my husband agreed totally.
I had a friend who died young (18) and the church totally disregarded his wishes, and opened his casket when he had been very explicit about not having open casket. The church simply did what they wanted to do, because for the church, they are the final arbiters of everything.
“because of the teaching that Christians will be raised from the grave ahead of the Day of Judgment.”
Ah yes; I remember this from when I was a little catholic kid. The rationale was AFAIR that you were denying doG’s ability to reconstitute your body into a “glorified” body prior to you becoming one of the “heavenly host” or something. Nothing about if doG couldn’t reconstitute an urn of ashes how TF was he going to reconstitute a body that had mouldered away millenia ago? Just one of those many rational questions that occurred between the ages of seven and fourteen