On Tuesday October 23rd the Canterbury rugby community turned out to support Steve Hansen and his two brothers and sister at the funeral of his father Des at Christ the King Catholic church in Burnside. Hansen said his father, a successful coach of Marist in Christchurch senior rugby in the 1980s, was a tough character Read more
Liverpool is the first diocese in England and Wales to commission lay people to preside at Catholic funerals. The commissioning of 22 lay people is an effort to relieve pressure on priests. “In some of our parishes in the diocese priests are being asked to celebrate over 120 funerals each year,” Archbishop Kelly wrote in Read more
Bestselling Irish author Maeve Binchy, who lost her faith as a young woman, was thanked for her generosity to the Catholic Church at a funeral Mass in the parish where she lived. Father William Stuart told a crowded congregation in the Dalkey district of Dublin that Binchy had not been a religious person in a Read more
A surge in popularity for cremations in the US is threatening to overwhelm its “mom-and-pop” funeral homes, which count on big burials for their profits. The recipients of the pricey goods Mike Nicodemus sells will not be around to enjoy them. For the baseball fan, he offers a cremation urn with the favourite team’s logo. Read more
King George Tupou V of Tonga has died, in Hong Kong. No cause of death has been given but Tupou was know to have suffered from diabetes and gout for years and last year had a cancerous tumour removed from his kidney. On February 24 he had an audience with Pope Benedict in the Vatican Read more
A priest in the parish of Liempde in North Brabant refused to conduct the funeral of a man who had chosen euthanasia.
Read the article...
Anglican Archbishop of New Zealand, David Moxon, said Sir Paul Reeves was a hope-peddler, a joy-bringer, a courage-bearer. “Someone who stands alongside people and searches for common ground.” This was just one of the many tributes made to Sir Paul Reeves at his funeral in Auckland yesterday which was attended by more than a thousand mourners, Read more
A woman died from a heart attack after waking up at her own funeral. Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, 49, had been wrongly diagnosed as “brain dead” by doctors, but as mourners passed by her open coffin they were stunned when the supposedly dead woman suddenly woke up and started screaming. “Her eyes were moving and we immediately Read more