356. What are the main moments in funerals?
(Comp 356) Usually, funeral rites consist of four principal parts: welcoming the
body of the deceased by the community with words of comfort and hope, the
liturgy of the Word, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and the farewell in which the
soul of the departed is entrusted to God, the Source of eternal life, while the
body is buried in the hope of the resurrection.
“In brief”
(CCC 1686)
The Order of Christian Funerals (Ordo
exsequiarum) of the Roman liturgy gives three types of funeral
celebrations, corresponding to the three places in which they are conducted
(the home, the church, and the cemetery), and according to the importance
attached to them by the family, local customs, the culture, and popular piety.
This order of celebration is common to all the liturgical traditions and
comprises four principal elements:
To deepen and
explain
(CCC 1687)
The greeting of the community. A
greeting of faith begins the celebration. Relatives and friends of the deceased
are welcomed with a word of "consolation" (in the New Testament sense
of the Holy Spirit's power in hope) (Cf. 1 Thess 4:18). The community
assembling in prayer also awaits the "words of eternal life." The
death of a member of the community (or the anniversary of a death, or the
seventh or fortieth day after death) is an event that should lead beyond the
perspectives of "this world" and should draw the faithful into the
true perspective of faith in the risen Christ. (CCC 1688) The liturgy of the Word during funerals demands very
careful preparation because the assembly present for the funeral may include
some faithful who rarely attend the liturgy, and friends of the deceased who
are not Christians. The homily in particular must "avoid the literary
genre of funeral eulogy" (OCF 41) and illumine the mystery of Christian
death in the light of the risen Christ.
Reflection
(CCC 1689)
The Eucharistic Sacrifice. When the
celebration takes place in church the Eucharist is the heart of the Paschal
reality of Christian death (Cf. OCF 1). In the Eucharist, the Church expresses
her efficacious communion with the departed: offering to the Father in the Holy
Spirit the sacrifice of the death and resurrection of Christ, she asks to
purify his child of his sins and their consequences, and to admit him to the
Paschal fullness of the table of the Kingdom (Cf. OCF 57). It is by the
Eucharist thus celebrated that the community of the faithful, especially the
family of the deceased, learn to live in communion with the one who "has
fallen asleep in the Lord," by communicating in the Body of Christ of
which he is a living member and, then, by praying for him and with him. (CCC
1690) A farewell
to the deceased is his final "commendation to God" by the Church. It
is "the last farewell by which the Christian community greets one of its
members before his body is brought to its tomb" (OCF 10). The Byzantine
tradition expresses this by the kiss of farewell to the deceased: By this final
greeting "we sing for his departure from this life and separation from us,
but also because there is a communion and a reunion. For even dead, we are not
at all separated from one another, because we all run the same course and we
will find one another again in the same place. We shall never be separated, for
we live for Christ, and now we are united with Christ as we go toward him… we
shall all be together in Christ" (St. Simeon of Thessalonica, De ordine sepulturae. 336: PG 155, 684).
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