Catholics are permitted to cremate the dead under certain specific circumstances, but should not scatter a decedent’s ashes, store them in the home, or preserve them in a profane object, the Vatican announced in a new document on Tuesday.
The document, called an instruction, was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican department that promulgates and polices Catholic doctrine.
“By burying the bodies of the faithful, the Church confirms her faith in the resurrection of the body, and intends to show the great dignity of the human body as an integral part of the human person whose body forms part of their identity,” Gerhard Cardinal Muller, prefect of the CDF wrote.
Though the Church concluded that cremation does not expressly contradict Christian doctrine, the instruction teaches that corporeal burial better corresponds to the dignity of the deceased.
“Furthermore, burial in a cemetery or another sacred place adequately corresponds to the piety and respect owed to the bodies of the faithful departed who through Baptism have become temples of the Holy Spirit and in which ‘as instruments and vessels the Spirit has carried out so many good works,'” he writes.
Cremation is permitted only for undefined “sanitary, economic, or social considerations,” and one’s ashes are to be stored in a sacred space like a cemetery or a church. (RELATED: Trump, Catholic Leaders Respond To Clinton Emails Disparaging Catholics)
The CDF issued the instruction given the significant increase in cremations following the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, which altered Catholic practice surrounding funerals in many respects. The congregation’s express concern that certain practices or beliefs connected to the scattering of ashes reflect erroneous ideas about death or commitment to non-Christian ideologies. Furthermore, the congregation argued that corporeal burial fosters veneration of the martyrs and saints, and brings the faithful departed out of a “purely private sphere.”
“One must perhaps start from the idea of ecology, meaning respect for nature,” Father Thomas Bonino told the Catholic News Agency, in connection with the congregation’s concern for the dignity of the decedent’s body. “But the body is part of our nature, so a true ecology is also an ecology which takes into account the corporality of man.”
Nonetheless, the church still stressed its preference for corporeal burial over and against cremation.
“Following the most ancient Christian tradition, the Church insistently recommends that the bodies of the deceased be buried in cemeteries or other sacred places,” the instruction reads.
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