Catholic Death Rituals and Views on Suicide Across Religions

Death and Dying in Cultural and Historical Context

Death and dying are natural parts of life, just as conception, pregnancy, birth, and maturation. Yet the cultural paradigms surrounding the issue of death and dying change considerably by culture, chronology, and even geographic location. Based on the last century or so in the United States, contemporary society has institutionalized, marketed, packaged, and managed the end of life. Death and dying have lost all semblances of spirituality and reverence, instead becoming a mind-numbing set of products to market and industries to support. Author and grief counselor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross similarly asks, "are we becoming less human or more human" in terms of how we treat the dying? (Kübler-Ross, 2005).

In primitive cultures, the process of death and dying was reverential. It was expected that, at some point, one's body would simply tire and one's soul ascend back to nature, or to a specific spiritual place depending on innate cultural beliefs. For most of history, recorded or otherwise, it appears that once the spark of humanity materialized in the proto-human brain, the idea of mortal awareness helped shape a certain reverence and respect for not only the aged members of the group, but also for the inevitability and process of death. Because societies were far more connected with the cycles of nature, death was seen as part of the continuum of life — a journey in which the participant is honored as they reach the stage at which life ebbs. Preparing for death, honoring the individual, and then celebrating their life was a ritual through which the community could reflect on the process of death and also reaffirm the force of life (Kellehear, 2007).

Contemporary America and the Institutionalization of Death

As humans congregated into urban areas, death was around them constantly. Through pestilence, disease, starvation, and the inhumanity of humans toward each other, death became an everyday occurrence, almost numbing the individual to the overall paradigm. Modern society, though, has become desensitized to death — "in great contrast… in which death is viewed as taboo, discussion of it is regarded as morbid, and children are excluded" from the process of death rituals (Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969, p. 140). Combined with a rather irrational fear and paranoia over a natural, inevitable event, humans seem more comfortable comprehending the death of thousands than the death of a single individual — or is it that death in large numbers simply anesthetizes our cultural sensibilities? (Huttenback, 2007).

It is ironic that in a century of such marvelous technological advances, science has solved many of the endemic killers of the past, only to yield the dual realization that the twentieth century was the most bloody and violent in recorded history, and that our wisdom of end-of-life care has not kept pace with our technological expertise (20th Century Democide, 2001).

And how does contemporary America treat its aged citizens and those who are ill and near death? Typically, "as a person with no right to an opinion" (Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, p. 141). In fact, we are more comfortable institutionalizing those who are dying and paying lip service to their care, while really wishing their issues, their needs, and indeed the process itself would simply disappear from our self-imposed sense of reality. Rather than allowing a person to die with dignity and on their own terms, we legislate the morality of life-and-death decisions — preferring that our elderly remain on life support, all dignity of personal decisions and private matters stripped away, simply so we can justify that we did "everything possible to keep our loved one alive" (Messerli, 2007). What then is the quality that makes us human? Philosophers have been asking this very question for thousands of years. Certainly, compassion and empathy must go to the top of the list, for how can a society consider itself civilized unless it truly shows compassion for all stages of life?

Personal Experience: Faith, Suicide, and Family

I am a 50-year-old male, born in London and moved to Ireland as an infant, then immigrated to the United States at age five. I was raised a strict Catholic. At my age I have witnessed both the process of death and the way death rituals are conducted within my family. My father committed suicide when I was ten years old — a gunshot after locking himself in the bathroom. I had five sisters; one recently died by drowning due to an alcohol-related incident. Our family was very strict about religion until my father died. In the 1970s, the Catholic Church was fairly rigid about the issue of suicide, and its lack of acceptance and tolerance pushed our family away from the Church. Having been an altar boy for most of my childhood, I simply could not understand the juxtaposition between what I heard preached during Mass — unconditional love, God's acceptance — and the realities surrounding my father's death. Although our priest did allow my father to receive Mass and be buried in the Church, there was a whispered assent that he had been in a state of sin when he died.

According to the strict interpretation of Catholicism, suicide is a grave or serious sin. The basic argument is that a person's life is the property of God, a gift to the world, and that anyone who knowingly destroys life asserts dominion and decision-making over God — a tragic loss of faith and hope. However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 2283, states: "We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives" (Catechism of the Catholic Church — Part 3 — Life in Christ, 2010).