Funeral Reform

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 6, 8 February 1906, Page 1

Funeral Reform

It appears that there is a society to be established in New York to wean people, and especially the poor, from their present extravagant displays in the matter of funerals. ' Nowadays,' says a writer in a New York paper, ' poor people, including some of the poorest, very generally carry industrial life insurance policies, on which they pay small amounts weekly. These policieg are chiefly used in the payment of funeral expenses. In the case of poor people an undertaker always requires cash or a 'guarantee, and the policy is practically turned over to him.' :There is in Australia and New Zealand many a priest who can speak with feeling of the manner in whichj sorely needed allowances of benefit societies have been swallowed up in foolish, and sometimes vulgar, displays of seeming wealth between the house of mourning and the grave. We, too, need, a funeral reforn^ association, though not so sorely as our friends across the Pacific. , ..J ,!)_,. * The idea of the ' slap-up ' funeral is at root a pagan , one. The mourning of the Jews for the dead was marked in early times by fasting, as well as the wearing of sackcloth and the scattering of ashes. It was only in later and more degenerate days that funeral feasts became the fashion. And the fashion, according to.Josephus ('Warstof the Jews,' 11. i.), reduced many of the chosen people to poverty, because they were ' forced to feast the multitude.' A big ' tangi ' has full many a time made the big brown-skinned tribesmen of New Zealand • suffer the penalty of conformity to a tyrant custom. The pagan Romans loved to make their funerals the occasion of lavish displays of wealth". Part of their spectacles of ' mourning ' consisted of deadly gladiatorial combats. Even the tomb of Caesar's daughter was desecrated by human blood. * The Church put a stop to displays of this kind. But a whiff of the old pagan love of reckless expenditure at funerals still hangs in the air. Some fifteen years ago, for instance, an Englishwoman named Haller spent £4000 upon the shroud which was to wrap her body in the grave. Sums quite as great are said to have been spent upon flowers alone at many an American funeral. The tendency to lavish expenditure is very marked among the poor of many countries— the Italians, for instance. The feeling is, perhaps, a kindly one. But it often leads to the sinful waste that makes woful want. The custom of reckless funeral feasts is still in full vogue among the poorer classes^ in the North of England. And many a poor Irish peasant, who had not,

perhaps, proper sustenance during his last illness, has had to be ' buried dacent ' at all hazards. And did not the well-meant but mistaken hospitality of the Irish • wake ' develop at last into strch an abuse that the ecclesiastical authorities had to intervene in order to save the bereaved from their friends ? It was the case of the sick stag in the fable. The beasts of the forest came to condole with him, ate up all the grass, and the antlered patient died of starvation. In these countries the undertaker gets most of the ' grass.' Yes, we need funeral reform, on the lines of Christian simplicity, penitence, and charity. Some of our present funeral modes are neither common-sense nor Christian.