The Catholic Church has always been very good at baptising, marrying and burying people.
Those who avail themselves of the liturgies that celebrate and solemnise these key moments of our Christian existence are often called cradle-to-grave Catholics.
And if you believe the Vatican’s statistical office, we are growing in number. Its latest figures claim that the global Catholic population increased by 16 million new members between 2019 and 2020.
But I’ll let you in on a secret: the papal mathematicians are very good at addition, but they have an extremely hard time subtracting.
They only remove dead people, not those who have been baptised but no longer claim to be Catholic.
Of course, that’s not the statisticians’ fault, because it’s nearly impossible to know the exact number of people who have opted out or have just quietly walked away — unless, of course, they’ve formally quit by signing a legal declaration, as is possible in places like Germany.
In any case, there is more than just anecdotal evidence to show that the numbers of baptisms, church weddings and even funeral Masses are on the decline in most parts of the world.
I’m especially interested in focusing on the decline in church funerals, given that November — which begins with the Feast of All Saints and is followed next day by the Feast of All Souls — has traditionally been a special month for us Catholics to remember our dead.
I’m thinking especially of what appears to be a growing number of life-long Catholic who are deprived of a proper church funeral after they’ve died.
One of the greatest regrets in my life is that I allowed that to happen to my paternal grandfather when he died back in early 2004.
“Honey, we don’t want to have a funeral”
“Papa”, as we called my grandfather, became a Catholic in 1940 when he married the daughter of a Hungarian (Catholic) couple that had immigrated to the United States.
Like many so-called “converts”, he became a very “devout Catholic”.
He and my grandmother, “Nanny”, never missed Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation.
They religiously said grace before every meal, which included a Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer for extra measure!
I also discovered something else about Papa’s devotional life when I shared a hotel room with him and Nanny during a 1994 visit to Budapest.
Each night before going to sleep, he would kneel at his bed and spend nearly a half-hour whispering prayers of petition for the very specific needs of family members and friends.
He would also give thanks for the blessings of the day and ask forgiveness for any offences he knowingly or unwittingly committed.
On a cold Sunday afternoon in late January, some ten years after that memorable visit to Hungary, I was in Switzerland, when I got a phone call from a relative to inform me that Papa had died that morning.
He had spent the last several weeks in hospital and then a nursing home infirmary following a bad fall.
He was 87 years old.
I immediately called Nanny to tell her I was “coming home” on the earliest flight the next day and would be there in time to help plan the funeral.
“Honey,” she said, “We don’t want to have a funeral.”
Since she was a Mass-going Catholic, I was really stunned to hear this.
I said nothing more about it over the phone, thinking this was just her grief speaking.
My grandparents had been inseparable and they doted on each other throughout more than 63 years of marriage.
Obviously, Nanny was devastated at losing Papa.
Plus, my father, their only child, had died five years earlier. She felt alone and vulnerable.
Role reversal
When I finally got to her home a couple days later, I again brought up funeral arrangements.
But she repeated what she’d said on the phone: “We don’t want to have a funeral.”
And this is where I made the mistake that I regret to this day. I quietly just accepted her choice, failing to realize that Nanny was probably not in the right frame of mind to be able to make such a decision.
The fact that she was 83 was not the issue. She lived to nearly 99 and, until the last year or so of her life, was sharp as a tack.
No, the real reason was that Papa had always taken care of such arrangements as paying the bills, making the major purchases, and so forth.
She was not psychologically equipped or prepared to do so.
A number of other incidents occurred in the months afterwards that finally made me realise that our roles had been reversed.
Nanny, who had become like a mother to me after my dad’s death in 1999, now needed someone to be something like a parent or a protective son for her.
That someone was me.
Nanny lived on for over 15 more years.
She died on Holy Thursday (April 18) in 2019, just three days after the blaze that almost destroyed Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Such details one does not forget.
This time I picked up my phone in Rome and immediately began making arrangements for a funeral that would include a Mass for Christian Burial.
A lasting legacy
We had the celebration at St Stephen’s Church in Toledo (Ohio), which was the immigrant parish where she had been baptised in 1920.
There were only a few dozen people at the Mass.
Most of them were not Catholic.
The liturgy was carefully planned, and family members were assigned to place the pall on the casket, do the readings and present the offertory gifts.
The priest, a longtime friend of the family, gave a homily that highlighted aspects of Nanny’s life and challenged us to think hard about the one lasting legacy – just one thing – that she gave to each of us.
Although most of my family is no longer Catholic, all seemed moved by the ritual.
When we do funerals right, they are powerful.
One of my nieces even told me she was interested in becoming a Catholic.
I’d like to think that her great-grandma’s funeral helped in some way to confirm her desire to do so.
I scan the obituaries each day in the Toledo Blade and read of many people who grew up Catholic, went to the parish grade school and diocesan high school.
They were married in the Church. Some are even touted as being devout Catholics and active in their parishes when younger. But so often, they are never given a public funeral Mass, especially if they are elderly. I suspect that’s because their heirs are no longer practicing.
Sadly, the faith is not being passed on.
So I will be giving thanks for Nanny and Papa during the month of November as we remember our beloved dead.
For I am grateful that, among the many ways they influenced my life, inspiring me to hold on to the Catholic faith is the most important gift and lasting legacy they left to me.
- Robert Mickens is LCI Editor in Chief.
- First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.
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