South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham was laid to rest with a funeral July 28 at the Washington National Cathedral. Recently, some Catholic bishops have issued new regulations for funerals in their dioceses. This post isn’t a critique of Graham’s funeral. Rather, it affords some interesting insights into the theology of funerals about which we generally don’t talk much.

Graham’s funeral took place in Washington National Cathedral, a frequent backdrop for politicians’ and statesmen’s funerals. National Cathedral is Episcopalian; Graham was a Southern Baptist.

Once upon a time, those two Protestant extremes likely would not meet. Baptists are considered “low church” Protestants, that is, they regard most ecclesiastical traditions and art as unbiblical accretions. Things like church ceremonials are “adiaphora” — dispensable stuff. In good Baptist theology, there aren’t even two sacraments; Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are “ordinances,” i.e., they do them because the Lord “ordered” us to do so, and one doesn’t refuse divine orders.

Episcopalians, on the other hand, preferred to keep “smells and bells.” Like the Anglicans from which they sprung, they were quite content with keeping many Catholic forms, even if they jettisoned the form’s contents. Anglican theology might evacuate a lot of Catholic content, but its rituals happily imitate Catholic models. And, let’s face it, there’s something about Gothic forms and cathedral choir areas that get people feeling “churchy” in ways whitewashed walls and tiny tables don’t.

Speaking of forms without content, I’d note that while the Episcopal Church claims to have it, the Lindsey Graham funeral included no Eucharist. That’s a profound difference from a Catholic funeral, where it’s not just congregational prayers but Christ’s sacrifice that is offered as suffrages for the deceased.

None of those contradictions were apparent at those obsequies, however. Anglican ministers presided over the ritual, but Graham’s Baptist pastor was also present and preached.

Receiving the casket at the door and replacing the American flag with a white cloth point towards a common, ecumenical theology: Baptism is immersion into Christ’s death in the hope of Resurrection. Baptismal innocence is recalled at a funeral, not out of mistaken belief that someone has not sinned, but because baptismal burial in Christ is a lifelong project leading to this day (and the resurrection on the Last Day). I don’t know if Baptists clothe a newly baptized in white, as Catholic tradition does (at least giving the child a white garment), but that is the meaning of the pall. Its replacing the American flag also reminds us that, regardless of our national loyalty and patriotism, our fundamental citizenship is in the Kingdom of Christ, not any worldly one.

I’ll note satisfaction with the fact the Senator’s body was received at the door. More and more people — including Christians — no longer bring a body to be buried. They bring ashes. Cremation has acquired a following, even among Christians. But one of the main points of the bishops who have been addressing funeral discipline in their dioceses has been to emphasize the preference for burial over cremation. The Christian is called to follow Christ, in life and in death. Jesus was taken down from the cross and buried. As Catholics, we even meditate on His entombment as the Fourteenth Station of the Cross. For the longest time, Christians viscerally recognized that the deliberate physical destruction of the post-mortem human body was somehow not in alignment with the Christian view of the person or of death. Graham’s funeral bore witness to that.

Graham’s funeral was marked by a Liturgy of the Word and then a lot of talking. One observation: a fundamental shift from previous Christian practice brought about by the Protestant Reformation was its emphasis — in keeping with its sola Scriptura Bible focus — on the Word service. Indeed, so great was this stress that the Word Service did not just dominate, it displaced the Eucharist. The Eucharist ceased to be the normal (and normative) service, even on Sundays. In many Protestant denominations it became a monthly or even quarterly add-on to preaching. No focus here on the Eucharist as the “source and summit of the Christian life” (Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 10). And that was evident in Lindsey Graham’s funeral.

Yes, there was a lot of talking. Mostly about Senator Graham. The National Cathedral service embodied what the American funeral has largely become: a series of eulogies about the deceased. In a town like Washington, there’s even greater incentive for such encomia.

And that is an issue the American bishops sought to address in their comments about contemporary Catholic funeral practice: eulogies. Bishops have rightly sought to tamp down on the shift in Catholic funerals to imitate Protestant services by delivering eulogies. Contrary to the American expression, funerals should not be “celebrations of the life of X.” The focus of a Catholic funeral is, in some sense, bifurcated. Primary emphasis is not on the dead person but on God. A funeral is bringing our deceased brother or sister before the Lord, not a chatty conversation about his virtues and foibles, his serious goals and his funny moments. A funeral is also about seeing death — not just this death but death itself (including my own future death) — through the prism of Christian thought. Yes, secondary emphasis is on the dead person, but primarily as “a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins” (2 Mac 12:46).

That, of course, leads us back to the idea of prayer and sacrifice — the Eucharistic sacrifice — offered for the dead, and that is an idea alien to Protestant theology. Classical Protestant theology rejected the idea of suffrages for the dead and the early Reformed liturgies were revised to excise any suggestions of such. The fact there was no Liturgy of the Eucharist (regardless of what one thinks of Anglican orders) in this service is consistent with classical Protestant theology.

Eulogizing has infiltrated Catholic funerals, but with a peculiar — perhaps worse — twist. Catholics have not gone whole hog the way Protestant funerals often do in saluting the lives of the deceased. Instead, they have preserved the ecclesial and salvific dimension by resorting to a kind of quasi-canonization talk: “X is looking down from heaven at us and smiling.” One, indeed, hopes he is. But Catholic theology also has too long a tradition of recognizing that sinful man cannot enter the presence of Him who is all-holy, and, therefore, more important than our hope of immediate heaven is our readiness “not [to] rest until we conduct him there [by our prayers] to the house of God.” A legitimate question is posed whether we believe in sin and judgment when we so readily assign the deceased to beatitude. One wonders whether this is a bromide to avoid grappling with the fact that the God of Mercy is also the God of Justice and that, among the Four Last Things, judgment follows death and leads to two mutually exclusive choices, heaven or hell.

In that regard, I was pleased that some preachers at Senator Graham’s funeral — especially his Baptist pastor from South Carolina — did focus on judgment and did temper Pollyanna Paradise with Pauline sobriety that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God” (Heb 10:31). Protestant theology, of course, has its own peculiar eschatological twists: by rejecting Purgatory, one seems to become somewhat presumptuously convinced that, having “accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior,” the heaven/hell split is resolved in favor of the former. But this Catholic theologian has always asked the Protestant mainline: How, then, do you deal with the real fact of post-baptismal sin, including serious post-baptismal sin, in the life of Christians? You can’t deny it happens. So, what do you do with it and its remission?

With regard to eulogies, Springfield, Illinois, Bishop Thomas Paprocki has reiterated that while the funeral homily must focus on God, some “words of remembrance” — also God-focused — may be included, albeit to be delivered by the priest or deacon, not one of the mourners. Paprocki stipulates the proposed language should be delivered to the Church at least three days prior to the funeral, which itself points to another contemporary anomaly Paprocki appears to have taken for granted: the gap between death and burial. Traditionally, that gap was compressed: three days was generally an outside number. The fact the bishop can set that as a minimum for clerical preclearance of “words of remembrance” suggests that the interval between death and burial has become elastic. (Paprocki recommended eulogies for the post-cemetery meal that often accompanies funerals.) And I suggest the gap between death and burial is a problem. The earlier practice of a relatively compressed interlude between death and burial underscored a basic truth: death interrupts life. It interrupts it not just for the deceased but for those around him. Somebody died. There was going to be visitation — a wake — and a funeral. People adjusted their schedules to the dead.

But now, it seems the burial of the dead is often adjusted to the living. When would a funeral be “most convenient” for the family and the mourners? Bishop Paprocki implicitly touches on this phenomena when he prohibits in-church visitation of the deceased. Apparently, in some places, the “wake” has been compressed to an hour or two prior to the funeral and, in some places, transferred from a private or funeral home to a church. That is something Bishop Paprocki rightly recognized as abusive and banned.

But we should contemplate why. When a funeral is scheduled according to the convenience of the mourners, the idea that death is a radical interruption of life’s status quo is dulled, lost. Alongside this, the French philosopher Damien Le Guay has rightly noted the loss of a period of mourning. In the case of public officials like Senator Graham, that’s not wholly true: Presidents still order days of mourning, and President Trump flew flags at half-mast for Senator Graham for seven days. But, in the broader society, mourning has largely become privatized. It is something left to the immediate family, whom we praise when they “bear up” and conceal their grief. In losing mourning we also lose the chance to grapple with the reality of death.

After everybody voiced their tributes to Senator Graham, a variety of prayers, including something very akin to the Catholic Rite of Commendation, ensued. That again showed how much ecumenical ground currently exists — as well as how Catholic worship patterns are also frequently taken over by others. The coffin was then removed from the Cathedral to a waiting hearse for the next day’s burial in Graham’s native South Carolina.

Senator Graham’s funeral liturgy was instructive. It showed several elements that Christians share in common, often culled and adapted from Catholic forms. It included elements of recognition that man is under judgment as well as examples of how the Senator lived and took his Christian faith seriously. But it also showed something of a contemporary trend — originally Protestant but increasingly Catholic — that moves funerals away from a strong God-focus to a celebration of the decedent. That becomes especially obvious in the dominance of eulogies, particularly when they are multiplied. And — with no criticism of Senator Graham’s funeral plans — it ought to make us wonder, in the death of Christians, where the gravamen of focus needs to lie.

An article on some U.S. bishops’ new funeral policies is here.