Many more Catholics are choosing cremation over traditional burial. For centuries, the Church forbade cremation for it was, in those times, a sign of denial of the central belief in the resurrection of the body. Nowadays, almost all Catholics who choose cremation believe in the resurrection of the body, and thus the Church removed her restriction; we are free to choose cremation as long as we believe in the resurrection of the body and we bury the ashes of the deceased.
What I am finding, though, is that so many of us do not bury the dead after cremation. We place the urn in our homes, or scatter the ashes someplace, or even divide up the ashes among family members or make jewelry of it.
These practices are not expressing our Catholic belief in the Communion of the Saints, and are not permitted in Catholic practice.
The Church has done marvelously well in catechizing the faithful about the resurrection, but I sense we haven’t done well in teaching the communion of the saints. If we all took to heart this belief, we wouldn’t be so reluctant to bury the ashes of our beloved ones.
The communion of the saints is the relationships we continue to have with the deceased. We remain one family, even after death. The dead who are in heaven pray for us. We can talk to them and ask for their intercession. The dead in purgatory are with us and we pray for them. The dead are as close to us as they were when they lived their earthly lives. Our relationships to them never end, they just change. In many ways, we are closer to them after death than prior.
When we commit the body of a Christian to the earth, we do so with a firm knowledge that they are embraced by countless saints and angels. They are not alone. We are not alone either, for they remain with us in a remarkable way.
By retaining the ashes, I suspect we are expressing our reluctance to really embrace this truth of the faith. We are expressing a fear of “letting go.” But in all reality, we aren’t really letting go as much as embracing them in a new and more profound way. Burying our dead is an act of love, an expression of faith, and is done in profound hope.
