Ashes to Ashes, not Jewelry!

The local news recently presented a story of a woman who was very distraught, and understandably so, because her car had been broken into and what the thieves took was what they mistakenly believed to be drugs but were in reality a small box containing some of her late mother’s ashes.   When explaining why these should have been in the car she said it was her intention to mix some of them with her grandfather’s ashes and to have a necklace containing these made for her to wear!

As Catholics, this where our sympathy with her plight has to stop, because no one should be using human remains in any form as jewelry, nor should such remains ever be divided up and parceled out as souvenirs nor ever scattered in gardens or in the sea.   This is why cremation was frowned upon for centuries by the Church because it feared the practice would compromise our doctrine of the last things and the not insignificant place that the body has to play in those ultimate realities.



Indeed, it is our ancient and consistent belief that the human body,flawed and mortal though it may be, is destined to be recreated by God on the last day after the pattern of Christ’s glorified body and then reunited with the soul.  Therefore from the beginning of Christianity great respect and attention has been paid to the proper burial of the dead. It was the early Christians who created “cemeteries”, a distinctly Christian word meaning “sleeping place” as the resting place for the bodies of the deceased for this reflected the temporary nature of death, and the firm belief in the final resurrection of the body. In contrast their pagan neighbors had the “necropolis” or city of the dead where they visited the tombs of their deceased loved ones even bringing food and wine to share with them because to their way of thinking this was their new and permanent dwelling place. Surely as we hear this strange  story in the news or that of urns of ashes not infrequently turning up at yard sales and in Thrift Shops we can better understand why the Church banned the practice of cremation for centuries and while it may allow it now it still very much prefers proper burial of the dead.  Indeed, the Church does permit cremation but only so long as it isn’t chosen for reasons contrary to Christian doctrine, thus one must rightly conclude that such permission is void when the entirety of the cremated remains is not destined to be  interred in a grave or placed in a tomb within a reasonable period of time if not immediately  following the funeral services.

Indeed, if we would rightly be horrified at the thought of keeping the body of a deceased loved one permanently in our living room,or simply tossing that body into the sea or  cutting  off a  hand or any other body part and wearing it around our neck as a memento, then let us cultivate the same reaction to the cremated remains of such!

Fr. Edward Healey