The absence of farewell rituals is on the rise. We already stated this in August 2022, four years ago: “ Burying without ceremony ” Exaudi, Alfons Gra. Since this trend is confirmed, looking closely at the celebration of funeral rites, and at the bereaved who should be organizing the burial, we suspect that it is a phenomenon characteristic of our time.

Other data from the funeral industry confirm that burials without a ceremony are increasing in Europe. In Sweden, for example, the proportion rose from 2% to 8% in ten years, and in large cities it reaches 10%. In many cases, the bodies go directly from the hospital to the crematorium, without family members present.

There are contributing factors, but none are alarming in themselves. The first is immediacy, the speed. Despite the fact that Ecclesiastes says there is a time to die, we are all in a hurry. The primary reason for forgoing ceremony is not to waste time on something considered absurd. I remember, as a child, funerals that lasted a day or two, including the nights. Not even the best catering today could compare to the sweet wine and pastries served. There was no guest book. People remained without having to sign to leave a record. The women prayed endless rosaries. The men came and went.

Another factor, though not always present, is the social death of the deceased, occurring years before biological death, such as illnesses that impair consciousness and make personal relationships difficult. The person who was ill spent their final years isolated from family and friends. If the family has a weak network of friends, faced with the prospect of being alone, or nearly so, at the wake or funeral, they may also choose not to hold a ceremony.

New spiritualities. Increasingly, the traditional farewell is being replaced by other, more intimate and comforting, spiritualistic rituals. In some ways, the physical evidence of the coffin and the deceased hinders the idea of ​​death as an energetic transformation. In some cases, denying death as a way to avoid suffering leads to expending enormous energy trying to convince oneself that nothing has changed. Reality is stubborn and imposes itself, dismantling the mental strategies of denying the evidence of death in order to avoid feeling. Unresolved grief, which becomes chronic and desperately seeks solace in practices that numb anxieties, has its origin in deaths that were not accepted, deaths that were disguised at the time.

In other cases, the social aspect of death is omitted, and an intimate and personal affair is preferred, where the family organizes a private farewell. Neither neighbors nor extended family are invited. Even children are excluded from the ceremony. Months may pass before all the relatives and friends learn of the person’s passing.

There are also people who, while alive, have expressed a wish not to have any farewell ceremony. Perhaps they are disappointed by society, or critical of the funeral industry. Most have donated their bodies to science; others have not, but have made it clear that nothing should be done to them.

Along with the absence of a ritual, there is often no physical body present. Cremation and subsequent scattering of the ashes in open spaces or burial in a garden or flowerbed completes the erasure of the deceased.

In the absence of a place that commemorates the deceased, such as the cemetery, in the absence of a community that gathers to remember the deceased, in the absence of subsequent rites, only a memory remains, which in the best of cases is present on designated dates.

Many elderly people are preparing for their departure from this world. They are aware that their final resting place will not be the cemetery. Their descendants will not be there. Therefore, while they are still alive, they relinquish their burial niche, cremate the remains of their ancestors, and place the ashes where they have indicated their own ashes should also be laid to rest.

But the most conclusive factor is the crisis of faith. The farewell rite serves to connect the world of the living with that of the dead. If there is nothing, dialogue with nothingness is absurd. At most, as seen in non-religious ceremonies, there is an exaltation of the deceased, aimed at satisfying the desires of the living, or a collective catharsis to release future guilt. The absence of faith leads to the absence of ritual. Statistically, there are more cremations in non-religious ceremonies than in religious ones. Faith does not avoid remembrance; quite the contrary. Faith enters into communion with those who have died, who live for the Lord, and who must be accompanied in heaven as on earth by the praying community.

Although the ceremony is religious, we have noticed in our pastoral work how, in recent years, the celebration of the Eucharist at Christian funerals has been declining, often limited to a prayer service without Mass. This is primarily due to a break in the transmission of the faith to younger generations. We perceive the congregation’s difficulty in following the responses of the liturgy or praying the Lord’s Prayer.

Why this rejection of faith? Will funerary rites and monuments become a thing of the past? The oldest monuments across the globe are linked to the cult of the dead and communication with the afterlife, from pyramids to dolmens.

In our time, cemeteries are becoming less and less common. While there are still some visitors on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, the numbers are decreasing.

The church has a great opportunity to remember our ancestors in communion of life.

The dead are neglected when we do not pray for them. The great treasure that is the risen Christ, who died to accompany us in our dying, must be offered visibly.

The Pope said in his homily last year, on the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed: “The Christian faith, founded on the Paschal Mystery of Christ, helps us to live memory not so much as a recollection of the past, but as a hope for the future. It is not so much a turning back, but rather a looking forward, toward the goal of our journey, toward the safe harbor that God has promised us, toward the unending feast that awaits us. There, in the company of the Risen Lord and our loved ones, we will taste the joy of the eternal banquet: ‘On that day,’ we heard in the reading from the prophet Isaiah, ‘the Lord of hosts will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples on this mountain […]. He will swallow up death forever’ (Isaiah 25:6, 8).”

We have no need to hide, disguise, or deny death. We may feel fear or pain, but the solution is not to flee from or reinterpret death. On the contrary, life acquires its full meaning when death has an answer. In Christ, the answer is clear, and we celebrate it in every Eucharist.