Catholic church takes the fun out of ...erals.

[Ck]

Don't speak ill of the dead, says the proverb. Don't say much about the dead at all, says the Catholic Church.

The Sydney archdiocese has issued a set of guidelines for eulogies - the speeches that people give at funerals in memory of the person being mourned. There are tight constraints on duration and subject on the grounds that the subject of the funeral service is God, not man.

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When famous people do it they're generally considered to have got it right. But the Catholic Church feels behind closed doors some members of the public are getting it very wrong.

The Sydney archdiocese guidelines suggest - that only one person speaks at the funeral mass, that they concentrate on the human qualities of the deceased, avoid stories of drinking prowess or romantic conquests and limit their speech to no more than five minutes.

Father Timothy Deeter drew up the guidelines. He says great care went into the document. "We've been getting, you know, some questions and queries, some complaints. And it's been a three-year process. This is not a knee-jerk reaction".

"We've actually been doing a lot of research to find out what other dioceses or churches in the English speaking world are doing, and we've consulted with a number of funeral directors, with lay-people and we've had a 14 member committee, most of whose members are lay-people, working on this". "We've had funerals of young people that may be playing heavy metal music, which I personally don't believe is appropriate in a church environment".

and the best

"There's been even very poor language used by some of those speakers in a church environment and I don't believe that is an appropriate place for that".

That's just typical of the catholic church, to totally miss the point of a funeral. Ok so they're sending the body up to 'God' but the family are more often than not having a funeral as a chance to say their goodbyes and to offer some sort of rememberance to their loved ones life whilst they were on this earth. Who the hell are they to say only one person can speak and that the one person must limit their time to five minutes or less?

Funerals are not the happiest of occasions but to be instructed to keep the eulogy short and to practically say their family must offer no anecdotes of the persons time here at all is tantamount to instructing people to have no emotions. This just goes to show what a bunch of callous bastards the catholic church actually are.

[SFB]

I didn't read all of your post Ck, it was enough to read the first line!

Churches and religion have been taking the fun out of life since religion was first invented. (by a man imagine)


Nothing ever changes much, so don't panic?

[Ck]

Ok.

But they do piss me off

[LennyP]

Though I'm not Catholic, my dad very actively is, so I hear a lot about this stuff. That's so typical of the Catholic Church. Even here in America it seems like every move they make is to try and make religious services less personal and more robotic. I can see where they would say that they don't think some things are appropriate in a church environment, but funerals are all about saying goodbye and remebering loved ones for most people rather than just being yet another church service. That's why the Catholic church alienates so many people and is losing strength here; because they want there to be nothing personal in the church at all.