Eleven years ago, after my sister’s funeral, I wrote a piece about a terrible preacher’s hellfire and brimstone sermon. He used the pulpit to inform hundreds of mourners in a packed church that we’d face the same hellbound fate as my sister unless we became saved by begging for forgiveness and joining the church, to which we should immediately surrender our souls and cash.
I recently experienced a similar holier-than-thou fest at a funeral service in New York, where a Catholic Priest started his remarks by telling the group of mourners they’d “broken the rules” since cremation had been chosen. Never mind that those were the wishes of the recently-deceased.
The church is forever changing their arbitrarily manufactured rules. First you couldn’t cremate human remains at all, then as of 1963 you could, but you couldn’t scatter them or have them kept in a home, then maybe you could. Catholics vary on what is allowed or not allowed, which can be measured based on the intensity of upbringing, measured via things like whether they still say “and also with you” as a Mass response or are schooled on the new “and also with your spirit” jazzy brand of responses. We learned communion lines like, “Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed” and then they changed the script to try to out the Holly-Lily Catholics that never go to church and trip us up at the altar.
After declaring the “broken rules,” which isn’t even accurate but apparently this crusty priest hadn’t received the church’s own 1963 memo, Father Grim Reaper went on in Beast Guilt Mode to drop the usual sin and Hell references and, as had been done in my sister’s funeral, not mention one single kind or loving word about the deceased or the grieving family. This is completely shitty. Padre was hired to do one job: deliver comforting remarks. He failed that job in favor of choosing a worn-out Catholic litany of guilt, sin, and damnation, delivered in his worn-out black shirt, pants and orthopedic shoes, holding a worn-out Bible he uses as a weapon to inflict pain and suffering on those already worn out by pain and suffering.
There are thousands upon thousands of words in that Bible that could be used in comfort and love— Jesus seemed to me a loving dude; as I mentioned in the piece about my sister, he wasn’t an asshole. Words from that book can be chosen to give any message and they often contradict each other. Is it eye for an eye or forgive one another? Turn the other cheek, judge not lest ye be judged, cast the first stone, speck in a neighbor’s eye, all kinds of contradictions exist in religion between a forgiving and punishing God. But is a funeral service the time to list them?
This ghoulish priest, after his guilt-and-shame routine escalated to full-on holy water flinging exorcism behavior, had the Catholic audacity to whisper to a family about a “purgatory mass” being held in the upcoming week; an implication that to survive the great sin of cremation, prayers for soul salvation from purgatory to a heaven upgrade would be necessary. Fucking purgatory mass? The absolute drama of believing you have to beg God to get into heaven. Don’t threaten me with a good time, I was tempted to show up with handmade “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints” protest signs since the whole thing is reminiscent of the time Sister Saint Catherine told us we were forbidden from listening to “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel.
I went full recovering-Catholic-Karen and marched to the funeral home director, informing her that Padre Purgatory had been upsetting to the family, used the phrase “you have broken the rules,” etc. She appropriately expressed her condolences and regrets, relaying that over 70 percent of services consist of cremations today and agreeing the hellfire and brimstone exorcism holy water routine was out of line. I’m hopeful he won’t be making reappearances at the services of future Catholic families who choose cremations at that particular facility. Death is difficult enough without clergy making it harder for people just trying to get through it. The experience was a reminder of why I answer “recovering Catholic” when people ask about my religion.