Bury the Dead

By Fred Vilbig


In my work as an estate planning attorney, I go to a lot of funerals. Some of my kids have told me that I have the most depressing job in the world since I deal with so much death and dying.

Normally funerals have family and friends that gather from all over. There is a wake the night before. At least here in St. Louis we seem to have developed a custom of putting up a display of pictures of the decedent, and everyone talks about what a nice person he or she was. At the funeral, the priest will usually say some kind words about the decedent, and after the Mass, there is a eulogy by a friend or family member that does the same kind of thing.

I recently attended a funeral that had none of that. The decedent’s only sister had died a couple of years earlier. There were no children or nieces of nephews. The woman had been perhaps a little cantankerous, so there was only one neighbor couple, our parish mourners, some bank trust officers, and me. This started me thinking about what we really are doing at funerals.

Burying the dead is one of the seven corporal acts of mercy. Some may think that it is an odd act of mercy since the person is dead. They may see it as a necessity for health reasons. They may see it as a way to wrap things up for the survivors. Many think that we should just cremate the body and dispose of the ashes in some convenient way.

It is interesting to remember that the practice of burying the dead is an ancient custom in many societies. Archaeologists are constantly finding the graves of ancient communities, and most of them contain artifacts that were buried with the deceased. Maybe the Egyptian pyramids are the best examples of this. But why bury things with a dead person? Surely they won’t need them.

I think that things were buried with the dead and their bodies were treated with such great respect precisely because these ancient societies thought they would need them. Communities that respectfully buried the dead had a strong belief in the afterlife, and some thought that the deceased would need their bodies in that afterlife.

It is interesting to note that in Hinduism, cremation is the norm. As I understand it, Hindus do not believe in the resurrection of the body but in a sort of migration of the soul through “reincarnation.” The soul simply moves to another physical body, maybe another person, but it could be an animal such as a cow. Hindus cremate precisely because they do not believe in the resurrection of the body. The soul is not necessarily a part of the body in their religion.

As Catholics, we emphatically believe that the body and soul are fundamentally entwined. We are not just en-souled bodies. We are a body-soul composite. Our practice of burying the dead reflects our belief in the resurrection of the body. If there were not resurrection of the body, what would it matter what we do with a corpse? And our belief in the resurrection of our bodies is directly tied into our belief in Christ’s Resurrection. As St. Paul points out in his first letter to the Corinthians, to deny the resurrection of our bodies is to deny the Resurrection of Christ.[1] To deny the Resurrection of Christ is to deny our very faith in Christ. The care we show to the body of a decedent is a statement of our faith in the Resurrection.

But funerals are more than just to show respect for the body of a deceased person who we hope will rise from the dead. No, we have a valuable role to play.

Unlike our Protestant, agnostic, and atheist friends, Catholics believe in Purgatory, a place where God shows how truly merciful He is. We believe that the prayers of the living are beneficial for the souls in Purgatory who are on their way to Heaven, but not there yet. A funeral Mass is probably the best way to help our loved ones on their way to Heaven.

So even if you are the only one at a funeral Mass, even if there is no visitation the night before, even if there is no eulogy at the Mass, our prayers for the deceased are immensely valuable, and they are a work of tremendous mercy.


[1] 1 Cor. 15:13.