Cremated Remains Allowed At Funeral
Submitted By N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune 09-20-1997


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For the first time, Catholics burying relatives who have chosen to be cremated can
have the cremated remains present in church during the funeral Mass.

At the request of American bishops, the Vatican recently approved texts of new
prayers to be used in such funerals.

The new option should be available to New Orleans families as early as Oct. 4 and
will certainly be in place by Nov. 2, said Deacon Ron Guidry of the Archdiocese's
Office of Worship.

Richard Briede, a funeral director at Lake Lawn Metairie Funeral Homes, said that
about 15 percent to 20 percent of families his company works with opt for
cremation. Nationally, cremation is more common. Approximately 30 percent of
Catholic funerals in the United States today include cremation of the body, a
figure that in part prompted the U.S. bishops to seek approval for celebration of
the funeral Mass in the presence of the cremated remains.

For centuries, the Catholic Church forbade cremation entirely.

The ban was the church's response to the use of cremation in the 18th and 19th
centuries by champions of science denying the Christian teaching of bodily
resurrection and the immortality of the soul, Guidry said.

In 1963, the Catholic Church began to permit cremation if it was not a denial of
belief in the resurrection of the dead. But it did not permit cremated remains to
be present during the full funeral.

As a practical matter, for years Catholics have found an easy accommodation to the
no-ashes-in-church policy: They arranged for the presence of the body at a
traditional funeral Mass, then cremated the remains later.

Nonetheless, a number of Catholic pastors said they expect families to welcome the
church's accommodation of a growing custom.

"It was sometimes kind of strange to do a funeral service with no remains
present," said Monsignor Crosby Kern of St. Angela Merici Catholic Church in
Metairie. "I think here's another case of the church beginning to understand
itself about a new circumstance."

"In time I think even this will be the normal thing," said Monsignor Allen Roy of
Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Algiers. "Frankly, I don't see any difference
between cremains in a small urn or vessel, and body in coffin."

In other traditions, most Protestant denominations permit cremation; Judaic
practice is mixed. Reform congregations generally permit it, Orthodox Jews forbid
it and Conservative practice varies from place to place.

Although it blesses cremation, the Catholic Church prefers the custom of burial
because it is deeply rooted in early Christian practice, Guidry said.

In the first centuries of the persecuted church's existence, caverns containing
martyrs' bones became places for refuge and special reverence; bits of bone and
other mortal remains from those who died heroically became artifacts that early
communities used to heighten devotion.

Church practice still requires that ashes be treated as an intact body, Guidry
said.

That means cremated remains must be entombed, as a body would, and not kept at
home or some similar place, he said. For the same reasons, Catholic priests may
not officiate at a memorial where ashes are scattered.