VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) – The Vatican’s doctrine watchdog has sparked fresh controversy over the practice of cremation after issuing a new ruling on preserving the ashes of cremated bodies.
Cdl. Gerhard Müller
The note published Tuesday by Cdl. Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, was signed by Pope Francis and overturns a 2016 ban on reserving the deceased’s ashes at home or dividing them among family members.
Catholics opposed to cremation are hitting back at the new ruling, citing earlier magisterial teaching from popes, councils and canon law, which categorically forbade cremation on pain of the most severe ecclesiastical penalties, including excommunication.
Response to Dubia
Cardinal Fernández’s ruling is in the form of a response to two questions (dubia) posed by Cdl. Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, that seek to accommodate the wishes of the “increasing number of people desiring to cremate the bodies of the deceased and scatter their ashes in nature.”
Zuppi asks if there could be a designated “sacred place” for the “commingled accumulation and preservation of the ashes of the baptized,” where the names of the dead would be recorded.
The cardinal-archbishop of Bologna, regarded as papabile in the next conclave, also asks if family members can be permitted to keep a portion of the deceased ashes “in a place that is significant for the history of the deceased.”
The DDF has replied to both questions in the affirmative, stressing that the new provisions must ensure “that every type of pantheistic, naturalistic, or nihilistic misunderstanding is ruled out” and provide for the ashes of the deceased to be kept in a “sacred place.”
Fernández does not specify whether sacred sites for preserving ashes might include a family altar or chapel in a family member’s home, or a river, field or mountain that has been blessed and designated as sacred by the relevant ecclesiastical authority.
Müller’s Prohibition
The 2016 decree Ad Resurgendum Cum Christo issued by the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by the former prefect Cdl. Gerhard Müller prohibits “the conservation of the ashes of the departed in a domestic residence” except in “grave and exceptional cases dependent on cultural conditions of a localized nature.”
“The ashes may not be divided among various family members,” Müller notes. Moreover, when the deceased “notoriously” demanded cremation and scattering of their ashes for reasons contrary to the Christian faith, a Christian funeral must be denied to that person.”
Deacon Nick Donnelly told Church Militant that Cdl. Fernández’s ruling on cremation “exposes the flip-flop chaos at the heart of Francis’ pontificate.”
“The current prefect for the DDF has driven a coach and horses through the explicit directives of a previous prefect in just seven years,” Donnelly lamented.
He further elaborated:
Cardinal Müller issued a cogent instruction on the interment of ashes explaining the Christological, pneumatological and eschatological doctrines underpinning these prohibitions — the resurrection of the body, baptized bodies having been temples of the Holy Spirit, the need for public prayers for souls in purgatory and the veneration of saints.
“Ignoring these doctrinal safeguards,” he adds, “Fernández is now permitting the dispersal of a portion of the ashes in unspecified locations, implicitly including storage at home.”
Resurrecting of the Body
In comments to Church Militant, medieval Oxford scholar Dr. Joseph Shaw slammed the DDF ruling as “the latest of a series of predictable concessions to secular practices and attitudes at right angles to the traditions of the Church.”
“These traditions inculcate and manifest the teaching of the Church, and their progressive disappearance reflects and accelerates the loss of the faith,” Dr. Shaw lamented.
“The desire to scatter ashes, even more than the desire for cremation, is clearly connected with an understanding of death incompatible with our belief in the resurrection of the body, as a kind of return of the body to nature,” the Catholic author explained.
Anticipating anti-cremation arguments based on the resurrection of the body, Fernández offers a 400-word preamble in the new ruling, explaining that “the body of the resurrected person will not necessarily consist of the same elements that it had before it died.”
Portrait of Pope Boniface VIII
Since the resurrection of the body “is not a simple revivification of the corpse,” it can occur “even if the body has been totally destroyed or dispersed” in a cremation, the cardinal adds.
Several Catholics opposed to cremation blasted the Vatican’s ruling on X (previously Twitter), remarking that “cremation should never have been permitted by the Church to begin with” and wondering if the DDF had “abandoned” the biblical belief in the resurrection.
History of Cremation Ban
The Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne criminalized cremation in A.D. 789, except for saving dead bodies from the ravages of the enemy and as an emergency measure during plagues.
The Encyclopedia of Cremation explains how the pagan custom of cremation was increasingly abandoned in the West from the fifth century, “as the symbolism of earth burial came to be identified with the burial of Christ and with the final resurrection of the body.”
“Cremation became identified as one very specific vehicle for social change,” the authors note, explaining how Catholics in Italy found cremation unacceptable “because it was favored and advocated by Freemasons as antipathetic to the Church.”
In 1299, 1300 and 1303, Pope Boniface VIII banned the practice of dismembering the departed and “any other practice resembling it,” a ruling interpreted as also forbidding cremation.
In May 1886, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office (the former name of the DDF) ordered the excommunication of Catholics belonging to organizations advocating cremation.
Pope Leo XIII ratified this decree seven months later (December 1886), depriving Catholics who asked for cremation of a Catholic burial. In 1892, priests were ordered not to give such Catholics the last rites, and no public funeral Mass could be said. Only in the exceptional circumstances of a plague or a health epidemic did the Church permit cremation.
Urn for preserving ashes of cremated Catholics
In June 1926, the Holy See issued an instruction to all bishops that reminded them of the “repeated declarations and decrees of the Holy See” on the topic. The instruction reiterated the ban on cremation, calling it a “grave abuse.”
The Vatican excoriated cremation as a “barbarous practice which is contrary not only to Christians but even to natural respect for the bodies of the deceased, and wholly averse to the constant discipline of the Church even from the earliest times.”
The ruling forbade ecclesiastical funeral rites for the deceased, honoring the ashes with ecclesiastical burial, or preserving them in a blessed cemetery.
“The bodies of the faithful must be buried, and cremation is reprobated,” the 1917 Code of Canon Law declared. “Persons who have given orders for the cremation of their bodies are deprived of ecclesiastical burial, unless they have before death given some signs of repentance.”
Canon 1241 also permanently prohibited all public Masses for a cremated person.
Cremation for Catholics was permitted for the first time in 1963 when Pope Paul VI approved the Holy Office’s instruction De cadaverum crematione: Piam et constantem.
Since cremation does not prevent “divine omnipotence from reconstructing the body,” it is not the “objective denial of those dogmas” and “not, therefore, something intrinsically evil or in itself contrary to the Christian religion,” Pope Paul VI declared.
Orthodox Church Forbids Cremation
The Holy Synod of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Greece upheld its ban on cremation in a four-page missive issued in 2019.
“Dead bodies are not garbage. They are not useless objects that must be handed over to fire and fragmentation, that is, to a violent extinction,” the synod declared, describing the final product of cremation as “not much different from waste recycling.”
Although the church “does not force any person to follow her traditions,” she has “the right to regard cremation as a treatment contrary to her principles, tradition and customs,” the document adds.
The synod document continues to note that those who do not want to follow the tradition of the church “have the right to choose cremation but will not receive a funeral service from the Church.”
“A fine example of the sanctity of the human body is the veneration of the holy relics of the saints. Burial belongs to the tradition of the Church, which, based on Evangelical and Patristic teaching, respects the human body as a creation of God, therefore, the buried body becomes an object of care and prayer,” it concluded.