Time for more funerals to take place outside church

A video has been doing the rounds online of an Italian priest at a funeral Mass here in Ireland interrupting a eulogy. It is not clear how long the man in question had been speaking for, but the priest suddenly announces: “That’s enough”. He said a boy near-by was sick and presumably the priest was anxious for the Mass to continue.

The priests then told the congregation that in Italy short means short, but in Ireland “short means 50 minutes”.

That was probably too bluntly said for most of us, but all the same, I wondered if some of the assembled mourners were starting to get fidgety in their seats if the eulogy had been going on for too long?

We have all been to weddings where the speeches seem to last forever. I was at one where about eight people spoke one after the other and it was well over an hour before they had finally finished. The patience of the guests had been well and truly worn out by then, although we did our best to hide it.

But while it is one thing to speak forever at a wedding reception, it is quite another to do so at a funeral Mass, especially when the person delivering the eulogy doesn’t know when to stop and seems blissfully unaware that they are in a sacred setting.

Approaches

Dioceses around the country take different approaches to eulogies. Back in 2013, the then Bishop of Meath, Michael Smith, banned them altogether from churches in his diocese, along with other practises he said did not belong in a church setting.

Among these were readings not taken from the lectionary; secular songs, poems, and texts devoid of Christian content; and eulogies.

His guidelines also said: “the deceased should not be canonised in the homily.”

This was a clear reference to the tendency these days to turn the deceased person into a saint and declare confidently that they are in heaven. But we pray for the dead precisely because we can’t know that. From a Catholic point of view, it is more likely that they are in purgatory. If we die in Christ, we die forgiven, but very few of us die in a state of moral perfection.

We now live in a time when a lot of people who still want to use a church for the big occasions have no real Christian faith”

A Catholic funeral entirely misses the point if secular readings and songs overshadow the religious ones, if the person is canonised and if the eulogy interrupts the Mass and is not appropriate for its setting.

I have a bit of a confession to make. I delivered a short eulogy (about five or six minutes) for both of my parents after the funeral Mass was over in each case, but I did deliver it in the church. Dublin Archdiocese does allow for this, or at least it did back then, so no rules were broken. I canonised neither of them!

Unfortunately, we now live in a time when a lot of people who still want to use a church for the big occasions have no real Christian faith. Therefore, they don’t know what is expected of them in a church. The priest is reduced to a sort of service-provider, and he is expected to give them anything they want.

Heightened

If a loved one has died, sensitivities are going to be heightened, and it can be tough for a priest to set down clear boundaries and risk causing upset.

The person delivering the eulogy said the deceased person was fond of a drink, at which point he pulled out a can of beer from his pocket”

I remember one priest telling me a few years ago that a woman whose husband had just died wanted a song by Buddy Holly played at the funeral Mass. The priest refused, but this caused plenty of bad feeling, including among other parishioners who were friends of the woman and her late husband.

The priest was absolutely correct, of course, but you can see how awkward the whole situation was.

I’ve had other priests tell me similar stories. At one funeral, the person delivering the eulogy said the deceased person was fond of a drink, at which point he pulled out a can of beer from his pocket, opened it, and proceeded to drink the contents in memory of his late friend.

Shortly after Bishop Smith said eulogies could no longer be said in churches in his diocese, Fr Bernard Cotter wrote a piece about the controversy caused by the decision.

He remarked that a lot of people were no longer taking their cues from what is appropriate or inappropriate at a funeral from the Church, but from what they see on TV and at the movies.

Soap opera

He wrote that in soap opera funerals, such as the ones you might see in Coronation Street, clergy pay little or no role.

He said: “In all cases, it was the words of the mourners that mattered most: particularly the eulogy. Nice words or true words or honest and even controversial words spoken in the presence of the other mourners were the most important feature of these funerals.”

That might be all very well for a soap opera whose writers want a bit of drama, but it helps to create the expectation that a funeral in a church should copy what is seen in a soap opera. This means the eulogy is the centrepiece, not the Mass, not the prayers, not the hymns. What also matters are the songs and the personal items that the deceased person liked in life. The song could be something by Buddy Holly, as I mention above.

A big majority of wedding ceremonies now take place outside church and maybe the same thing needs to happen with funerals”

In other words, people want everything tailored for the person who has just died. This fits well with the extremely individualistic age in which we live but is entirely contrary to the notion that there are traditions and ways of life bigger than you, which long preceded you, and which will continue long after you are dead and gone.

A Christian is supposed to go through all the significant moments in life according to the customs and rites and rubrics of the Church they belong to. If you die a Christian, then you should want your funeral to be fully Christian.

Perhaps the answer is that there should be fewer funerals in churches in the future. A big majority of wedding ceremonies now take place outside churches and maybe the same thing needs to happen with funerals. Maybe more should take place at, say, the chapel of the cemetery where the deceased person is to be buried, assuming the chapel is not itself Christian. I was at one such funeral a few years ago. There was barely a Christian element to it, but the person who died hadn’t been to Mass in years.

Don’t be surprised if, in a few more years, only a minority of funerals are Christian in nature. Strange as it may seem, this might be for the best given how much society has changed.