Sentire Cum Ecclesia

I was not aware that there was any “backlash” against the Archdiocesan Guidelines on Catholic Funerals, until someone told me that at Mass on Sunday they heard a priest say in the homily “we will do funerals the way we have always done them: following the rite of the funeral mass but with sensitivity to what the family wants.” Well, yes, was my reply, that is rather what the Guidelines say, don’t they? But, said my informant, who had not read the guidelines, everyone is saying how insensitive and unpastoral the new guidelines are. Have you read them? I asked. No, I’m just going by what I read in the paper.

Ah yes. The papers. The source of all wisdom and knowledge… I had a bit of a laugh at something John L. Allen Jnr wrote the other day on this: he described religion journalists as “pundits who “know how to write better than anyone else, but who seem to have a problem with reading”.

Which brings us to Barney Zwartz’s piece in todays Age. Barney isn’t Catholic, but that has never stopped him having an opinion about how Catholics really should be doing things. Actually, his article isn’t too bad for the most part. He points out what a Catholic funeral is understood to be, and therefore concludes:

The Catholic guidelines basically highlight that a church funeral service is still a church service. Its purpose is to commend the deceased to God and proclaim the Christian hope; it is explicitly not a secular celebration of a completed life. Such a celebration is a natural, proper and desirable thing, but the occasion for it, according to the church, is a separate gathering. According to traditional Catholic thinking, the main priority at a church funeral is prayer for the deceased, and nourishing the grieving with the word of God and the Eucharist.

And if he had left it there, that would have been just fine. But he then does a complete 180 degree turn and gives his own two-pennies worth:

But times move on. The alternative view, shared by Father Bob, Melbourne Anglican Archbishop Philip Freier and others, is that it is about the living, and the main priority is pastoral.

Father Bob says he prefers to think of funerals as ‘‘family affairs attended by clergy, not a clergymen’s affair attended by family’’, suggesting only about 10 per cent of Catholics feel comfortable with these ‘‘sanitised’’ rituals. The rest want the ritual to reflect their lives.

There’s also the practical question of whether the deceased was a churchgoer. As Archbishop Freier says, ‘‘Often we first know the family through the death of a loved one, and that a very different ministry from someone who has been a regular congregation member. The funeral is about the grieving and the living.”…

For myself, I think funerals are for the living, and that you cannot separate the church from the culture. While I sympathise with the thinking behind the guidelines, I wish they were more flexible.

But with respect, Barney, no one asked you (or Father Bob, or Archbishop Freier) what YOU think “a funeral” is. The point of the Guidelines is that a Catholic Funeral should be what a CATHOLIC Funeral is. Of course protestants, like Archbishop Freier or Barney, who do not believe in those funny Catholic doctrines like Purgatory or offering the mass for the dead, wouldn’t get that a Catholic funeral is precisely about those things.

The Archdiocesan guidelines are not trying to restrict people in their practices of farewelling the dead. They are just about what the Catholic funeral rites are. The funeral mass is not a party put on by the Church for the family (as Fr Bob seems to think), it is something the Church does for the deceased person. That doesn’t rule out in anyway the grieving family doing what they think is appropriate, but (as Barney acknowledges) the Catholic funeral IS a service of the Catholic Church.

My friend, who told me about the homily mentioned at the beginning of this piece, asked “But can’t the funeral be both? Why do you have to be so strict about it?” The answer is fairly straight forward: because the Church has a message – the hope of Resurection to eternal life – which she doesn’t want garbled at this crucial moment by the inclusion of other messages which compromise that proclamation. Christian funerals, from the very beginning, were always counter-cultural. It was the witness to the Resurrection hope over against all the other pagan religious rites and beliefs around it, which proved to be a powerful persuasion to to those pagan cultures. We all know how fuzzy people’s thinking on the Christain doctrine of the afterlife is – the funeral is the most important point in time to get that message clear: Christ will raise the deceased to life again!

And, I pray, that “time” will never “move on” in regard to this central doctrine of the Catholic faith.

Tim Colbatch, Economics editor at The Age, has been trying to keep the issue of affordable housing on the boil (see here and here for earlier pieces) – even if our politicians seem treat the issue like playing pass-the-parcel with a time bomb (sorry about the mix of metaphors). Not being an economist, I find it very difficult to understand what causes the decrease in housing affordability, especially (as Colbatch points out) when we are living in a time of economic prosperity. He asks the very question that Perry asked a week or so back in the combox: Why is it that “a million or so young and lower-income Australians who want to buy a home of their own are now unable to afford a home that suits them”?

His article this morning is prompted by a new paper for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. While he acknowledges the paper’s suggestion that the solution lies in “a range of targeted solutions”, he also has this to say:

The weakness of their paper is that it looks for demographic reasons for the fall in home ownership, when it is clearly the result of competition from housing investors.

In the 1980s, 85 per cent of finance to buy existing homes went to owner-occupiers and 15 per cent to investors. In the ’00s, investors’ share averaged 41 per cent. In Victoria, in May and June 2010, investors buying existing homes got 51 per cent of bank finance, and owner-occupiers 49 per cent.

You cannot have investors increasing their share of the market without squeezing out the first home buyers. It’s a zero-sum game, and politicians such as Wayne Swan who give $5 billion a year in tax breaks to investors are in effect blocking young and low-income buyers from owning a home.

Oh no, they say, you can’t take away the negative gearing tax break without creating a shortage of rental housing. Yes, you can.

Aspiring first home buyers are mostly renters. When they buy a home, they cease to rent. There is one less home to rent, but one less household wanting rental housing. Supply falls by one, demand falls by one, and the net balance is unchanged. The market does not tighten. Rents do not rise. Families are not thrown out on the street.

This is an issue ripe for a reform government that is prepared to lose some skin to make Australia work better.

As Colbatch says in one of his earlier pieces on the subject: “Housing exists to provide shelter for families, not shelter from tax, and the law should be changed to reflect this.” I generally agree with Colbatch – comparing the massive change in investment to first-homebuyer lending would indicate that this is where the problem lies (in the main, anyway). And I agree with his simple point that in the long run there would be no “rental shortage”. Yet I am also aware that any changes to the current tax situation would need to be gradual rather than dramatic, because in the short term a removal of negative gearing and other tax breaks for rental investors would drive our rental prices up very rapidly. This would settle in time, but there would be a period of pain for both landlords and renters. Still, what must be done must be done. And yet one is all too aware that for any government to actually do this would require, in Sir Humphrey’s words, “courage”…

A remarkable article in the Irish Times (“Küng invokes spirit of Second Vatican Council he hardly saw”) from one who was there, Bishop Michael Smith (Bishop of Meath). According to the paper, Bishop Meath attended all 168 days of the Second Vatican Council for which he and 11 other young priests prepared the official record. In contrast, by Bishop Smith’s account, it seems that Dr Küng actually appears to have declined involvement in the event about which he so freely lectures everyone else. There are all sorts of narratives about the Second Vatican Council, but it is always interesting to hear the story from “someone who was there”.

Me thinks I can see the hand of Fr Portelli in this somewhere… Nevertheless, it is nice to know that we can still restore churches properly. For the full gallery of photos of the restored St Augustine’s Church at Yarraville, go to: http://www.cam.org.au/parish-news/st-augustines-yarraville-celebrations.html

Driving to work on Friday, I switched on 774 (our local ABC station) and heard Red Simons declaring: “I’m with the Church on this. I’m with the Pope.” What? Had Red got religion all of a sudden? Slowly the facts emerged. He was saying that “The Catholic Church” had declared that certain kinds of “inappropriate” music were not permitted to be used in funeral services (Hullo, I thought, something in this morning’s paper), and he was in full agreement. “And I want you to ring in and tell me what songs you think would be inappropriate at a funeral”, Red was saying. Actually, the callers came up with some quite funny possibilities for the “banned” list.

Any way, I only got to take a look at the “papal pronouncement” this morning – it is, of course, not from the Pope but from the next best thing locally speaking, our Archbishop. The Archdiocese of Melbourne Guidelines for Catholic funerals are not really anything new, but is a restatement and clarification of principles already long established. Only, with this restatement, no-one can now claim “I didn’t know about that”. The guidelines are clear and pastoral. Here are a couple of things that stood out for me – not necessarily because of their importance, but because of the “that’s-interesting” factor.

But in planning the liturgy, the celebrant should moderate any tendency to turn the funeral into a secular celebration of the life of the deceased. “The Church offers the Eucharistic Sacrifice of Christ’s Passover for the dead so that, since all members of Christ’s body are in communion with each other, the petition of spiritual help on behalf of some may bring comforting hope to others.” (GIRM 379)

Good word that, “moderate”. It acknowledges that there are some forces that will be very difficult to overcome entirely, but at least the priest can act so as to “moderate” these forces rather than encourage them.
I thought this point particularly interesting:

Designating a Catholic Funeral
When the Eucharist is celebrated, media announcements and the title page of a printed booklet should bear one of these designations:
•Mass of Christian Burial for Mary Brown,
•The Funeral Mass of Mary Brown,
•Requiem Mass for the repose of the soul of Mary Brown

If a Liturgy of the Word is celebrated the designation may be
•Rites of Christian Burial of Mary Brown
•The Funeral Liturgy of Mary Brown
A Catholic funeral is not “A celebration of the life of Mary Brown” or “A Memorial Service for Mary Brown”. These designations should never appear in media announcements or on the booklet.

This is an important point. It concerns branding, and the guidelines show a good grasp of the fact that the goods which the Church offers have to be correctly branded, so that they don’t give a false message about their contents. Good theology begins by calling a thing what it really is.

But note the guidelines are not insensitive to the natural human need to celebrate the life of the deceased loved one:

However, celebrating memories of the life of deceased may be carried out:
•the night before the funeral, either at the funeral parlour, or before the vigil or rosary in the church – if permitted by the Parish Priest;
•in a separate moment before the Mass or a Liturgy of the Word begins – if permitted by the Parish Priest;.
•at some social occasion before or after the funeral.

Similar suggestions are made for “Words of Farewell” (including poems and secular readings) and “Military Customs” (no mention is made of Masonic or Lodge customs – I suspect we are supposed to assume that everyone knows they have no place in a Christian burial…). The point is just that such focus on the deceased from a natural point of view (as opposed from a divine point of view) is not appropriate in the Funeral itself. The Funeral is designed to get across a particular message (“it may include appropriate reference to the deceased, [but] it is meant to be a message of Christian hope in the Resurrection” as it says elsewhere in the guidelines), and the Church does not want this message to be lost by getting mixed up with other powerful messages and narratives at work in this context.

There is a significant amount of emphasis on the evangelical opportunity presented by a Funeral. Regarding the homily, the guidelines suggest that it be “given in a positive spirit of evangelization”. And then there is this:

Moreover pastors should take into special account those who are present at a liturgical celebration or who hear the Gospel on the occasion of the funeral and who may be non-Catholics or Catholics who never or rarely participate in the Eucharist or who seem even to have lost the faith. For priests are the ministers of Christ’s Gospel for all.” (GIRM 385 and see The Rite of Funerals, Introduction, 18)

This includes again the very practical direction to include the full text of the Rite of the Mass in the booklets (and the note that “This will also be important when the new ICEL translations are introduced”). The guidelines even make the point that the pages of the booklet be numbered (presumably so that the celebrant can direct the people to follow the words of the rite).

I was interested in this:

There are three options for the colour of vestments: white, violet or black. In this matter, pastoral consideration for the circumstances and the wishes of the family should be taken into account and ethnic customs should be respected.

I did not know that black was an option for the Novus Ordo funeral mass – is this an effect of Summorum Pontificum?

Then of course comes the point that drew Red Simon’s interest:

Music

The music for a Catholic funeral is liturgical. What is possible will be determined by the circumstances and available musicians. Hymns appropriate to the occasion may be chosen. At the Mass, whenever possible the Lord have mercy, Holy, holy, and Lamb of God should be sung. Recorded music should be avoided.

Where possible it is desirable that the responsorial psalm and alleluia verse be sung.

During a psalm, hymn or music, members of the family and friends should take part in the Procession of the Gifts.

During the Rite of Farewell Saints of God or the alternatives (The Rite of Funerals, 187-191) should be sung if possible while the coffin is sprinkled with Holy Water and incensed.

Secular items are never to be sung or played at a Catholic funeral, such as romantic ballads, pop or rock music, political songs, football club songs.

At the funerals of children, pastoral care needs to be taken in the choice of music. Nursery rhymes and sentimental secular songs are inappropriate because these may intensify grief.

The point that interested me is the stipulation that, where possible, the Lord have mercy, Sanctus, Lamb of God, Psalm and Alleluia Verse are all to be sung. I would like to take from this that, if this is the standard set for Funeral Masses, then surely it ought to apply to Sunday Parish masses as well? Is that an illegitimate conclusion?

As regards “Recorded music should be avoided”, I would also like to have a small clarification. We suspect that what is meant is recorded tracks of the deceased’s favourite songs and such. But I do have a question about what is permissable when musicians are unavailable. Can suitable recorded instrumental music be used for a period of reflection during the offertory or after communion (as indeed often happens at Sunday masses where there is no musicians available)? And can pre-recorded instrumental music (such as a mp3 or midi file) – be used to support the congregrational singing? Given the shortage of musicians these days, it might be something that a priest may have a setting of the mass and the songs to be sung on mp3 (or midi file).

There is also an interesting note on cremation (which we have discussed several times on this blog):

The Church still favors the burial or interment of earthly remains, however since 1963 cremation has been allowed.

Cremation is best understood as processing a body before burial. For Christians cremation is not a religious act and it should not be confused with burial or interment. Therefore the following procedure would seem best.

1.The funeral Mass or a Liturgy of the Word is celebrated at the church as usual. However, at the end of the Rite of Farewell the celebrant does not say “Let us take our sister to her place of rest”. The coffin is taken from the church to the crematorium for private cremation without prayers.
2.At some later time, by arrangement with the family or friends, the ashes are interred in the churchyard, in a cemetery or some other appropriate place. The committal prayers for the burial of a body are used. The place of interment should be marked with the name of the deceased to assist those who wish to visit that place and to encourage prayer for the dead.
Circumstances may require the funeral rite to be celebrated as a Liturgy of the Word at the crematorium. Any suggestion that the remains are being committed to a furnace should be avoided. Therefore the funeral ends with the Rite of Farewell. The celebrant does not say “Let us take our sister to her place of rest”. The procedure of a later interment of ashes should be followed, as indicated above.

…Under some circumstances cremation may have to precede the funeral rites. Only in such rare situations may the ashes be set before the altar during the liturgy, which is followed by immediate interment of ashes, as indicated above.

In accord with Catholic tradition, scattering ashes cannot be regarded as an appropriate way of treating the earthly remains of the dead. Scattering ashes in a favourite place, e.g. on a golf course or at a beach, may even imply that the deceased would want to remain there, in this world, rather than entering eternal life with God. Keeping ashes at home or sharing ashes between relatives is also inappropriate and may imply an unhealthy even superstitious attitude to the remains of the dead.

All in all, thank you for this, Your Grace.

“Our Tracey” is becoming quite prolific these days in the popular media. She has a new essay on Ratzinger’s opposition to “Sacro-Pop” on the ABC Religion and Ethics site. Of course, this subject is the source of endless debate. As you know, yours truly has expressed his own opinions on the matter often on this site (most extensively here).

Some snippets from Tracey’s article and my comments:

In other words, pragmatism is the attitude of the cleric who says “the music might be a bit low-brow but it’s what people like.” According to Johansson the pragmatist “emasculates the gospel by using commercialized music to sell it.”

The idea of “marketing” the Gospel in a way that makes it “attractive” to the secular culture is always a mistake. Whatever way you wrap the present, inside the box will always be a bloody cross.

In a lecture delivered to the Church Music Department of the State Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart, Ratzinger further spoke of “puritanical functionalism” (the idea that we “have to keep it basic for the people”) as a “first millstone around the neck of Church music,” and the “functionalism of accommodation” (Church music must follow the norms of contemporary mass culture) as “the second millstone.”

When music serves a “function” you end up with a jingle. Music, like poetry and art, can be and often is reduced to serving a pragmatic purpose, but then you end up with something that ultimately is not poetry, is not art, and is not music. That is as true in the liturgy as it is in any other forum.

With reference to the rock music industry and in words that could have been written by Ratzinger, he argues, “This music is not designed for listening. It is the accompanying soundtrack to a drama, in which the singer, strange as it may seem, becomes something like the sacred presence of a cult, the incarnation of a force beyond music, which visits the world in human form, recruiting followers the way religious leaders recruit their sects.”

I disagree only with the statement that “This music is not designed for listening”. It is, in fact, entirely for listening. It isn’t, like Church music, designed for singing. It is orientated toward an “audience” rather than with the view of drawing the gathered assembly into a unified body. I know the force of music as well as anyone. In my car at the moment, I have all three soundtracks to the “Twilight” films. I find them powerful and evocative, and am able to listen to them over and over without boredom. Yet I have to acknowledge the truth of Ratzinger’s critique – this is an “incarnation of a force beyond music”, and it has the power of grabbing you with both hands.

He has also written that people who argue that liturgy should be about bringing God down to the level of the people are committing a form of apostasy, analogous to the Hebrew’s worship of the golden calf.

That is a damning critique if we take the time to consider it. The story in Exodux 32 makes it clear that the Israelites at Mt Horeb had no intention of worshipping any other God than the one who “brought us out of Egypt”, and yet they chose to do so precisely by adopting the religious customs of Egypt, that of embodying their gods in the form of animals. How can the Church remain “counter cultural” when she adopts and baptises the very heart of the prevailing culture in her liturgy?

A typical hallmark of a sacro-pop “hymn” is that one could just as easily be singing it to one’s lover, as to God.

Go and re-watch Sister Act and you will see how easily modern love songs can be changed with just a few words into something that looks very much like the modern “hymn”. Tracey is giving us a good rule of thumb here: if this song can be sung to my lover as easily as it can be sung to God, is it really suitable for the liturgy?

One does not have to be a theologian to discern the difference. Sacro-pop lacks the pathos of the great hymns of the Christian tradition and it diminishes one’s perception of divine glory. There is not the same sense of awe and of self-transcendence and only the most oblique references to the Incarnation, Passion and Redemption.

Ah, pathos. On the one hand, liturgical song must be something other than a “love song”, but that doesn’t mean that it should be without passion. Tracey cites the passage from “Come Down O Love Divine” which begins “And so the yearning strong…”. Another I would add is the closing verse of “When I survey the wondrous Cross” by Isaac Watts: “Were the whole realm of nature mine / That were a present far too small / Love so amazing, so divine / Demands my soul, my life, my all.” I always get goose bumps when I sing that verse… Of course, that hymn has “Incarnation, Passion and Redemption” in spades: “Forbid it Lord, that I should boast / Save in the death of Christ my God / All the vain things that charm me most / I sacrifice them to His blood.”

I suspect that, if a poll were taken one might find that the banality of sacro-pop is less of a liturgical carrot than a liturgical repellent.

Unfortunately, the polls that exist say otherwise (see for eg. here). But perhaps one of the reasons why these substandard hymns come in at the top of the list on a regular basis is that that is what we are serving up for our people to sing in the first place. Catholics do not regularly spend time with their hymnals at home singing through all the available material and deciding which they like. They only have what they hear at Mass on a regular basis to choose from. It’s a bit like taking a poll of people who eat at MacDonalds on their favourite meal: you aren’t going to get people voting for “Veal Cordon Bleu”.

News just in says that Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, has decided to cancel his plan to hold a “Koran-burning day” tomorrow. Thank God for that. But you must agree that he was remarkably successful at getting people’s attention just by the mere suggestion of the intention to commit such an act. Everyone from the Whitehouse to the Vatican came out and publically pleaded with the man to reconsider. Mind you, there are places in the world where the pressure to “reconsider” his plans would have been applied rather less publically and rather more persuasively. But in the Good Ol’ U. S. of A. Pastor Jones’ right to go ahead with his plan of action was protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution which guarantees freedom of speech.

My one observation to add to the whole mix is that the desecration of the Koran to a Muslim is rather more like the desecration of the Blessed Sacrament to a Catholic than the desecration of a Bible – although the latter would be shocking enough. To give an example, Catholics would have no difficulty with placing a bible on the floor (eg. next to your chair in a study room), but Muslims would never do such a thing to the Koran. We wouldn’t do it to the Blessed Sacrament either. That’s more the parallel here.

So what have we learned from all this? Probably not a lot. Pastor Jones was upset by the plans to build a Mosque at Ground Zero. He saw it as provocative. So he wanted to retaliate by doing something provocative in return. Despite the fact that the plans to build the Mosque at Ground Zero have become a source of contention, it was never the intention of the Imam who initially suggested it (whom I have met, by the way, on a visit to Melbourne a couple of years ago) that it should be. I can understand people thinking that his suggestion to locate a mosque at Ground Zero was not a wise one – for a raft of reasons – although it is sad that it should have been received by many as a point of provocation. Pastor Jones on the other hand had provocation as his major purpose in his plan to hold a Koran-burning day right from the start. He felt pain and wanted to cause pain in return to those whom he blamed for his pain.

Friends, this is silly. And dangerous. Anyone who has ever been a parent knows how these things escalate.
“Tommy broke my toy”.
“It was an accident”.
“Was not”.
“Was too.”
“Well, I going to break one of your toys.”
SMASH.
“You *%^@#!!! Now you’re really going to get it.”
PUNCH, KICK, SCREAM, HOWLING.

As Pope Benedict told the ambassador to the Holy See from Morocco in 2006: “Violence as a response to offences can never be justified, for this type of response is incompatible with the sacred principles of religion.”

This story in today’s Age, “Four-way struggle to care for baby E” eloquantly demonstrates precisely why “gay marriage” is a bad idea. The State supports and encourages and safeguards marriage with all the power of the law BECAUSE it is the environment most suited for the raising of children. Homosexual unions are, by their very nature, unfruitful. Any same-sex couple which desires to become “parents” must in one way or another “import” a child into the relationship. A child cannot be conceived by and born to a same-sex couple without the involvement of at least a third, or possibly even a fourth, party. Nor is it the natural place for a child to be raised.

Now go ahead and argue with me.

Does Australia Have A Government Yet?

I am not disappointed by the choice, although I would have been happy to see Tony Abbott as our PM. In the current context, to be handed government is to be handed something of a poison chalice.

One aspect of the new government actually frightens the willies out of me, and that is the possibility of a private members bill from Adam Bandt (Greens) for same-sex marriage. According to the new agreement it would get a hearing. However, also according to the new agreement, it would have to go to a Parliamentary Committee because it would be regarded as a “controversial” piece of legislation. What are the chances, do you think, of the current parliament voting something like this in? Certainly it would find the support necessary in the Senate after next July, with 10 Greens Senators holding the balance of power. The real question is, would it find 76 (or more) supporters in the lower house?

Hat tip to William Tighe for this one. Some of you might be interested. See: http://gottesdienstonline.blogspot.com/2010/08/about-face.html.

To help you understand, traditional Lutheran liturgical theology divides the liturgy into “sacramental” parts (ie. God to man) during which the pastor faces the congregation, and “sacrificial” parts (ie. Man to God) during which the pastor faces the altar (ie. East). Given the strident Lutheran rejection of the Sacrifice of the Mass, it always seemed strange to me when I was a Lutheran that the same traditional Lutheran theology preserved the practice of the consecration of the eucharist facing the altar, ie. the “sacrificial” stance.