DON'T SKIP THE FUNERAL...They're Part of Being Human | May 3, 2026

Funerals are quietly disappearing, and I do not think we realize what we are trading away. More and more, families tell us there will be no services at all, or we learn someone has already been buried with no prayer, no gathering, no public mourning. That choice is not just about preference. It exposes what we believe about the human person, what we think death means, and whether faith is still strong enough to bring us to the grave together.

In this episode, I walk through why funerals have always mattered, even before Christianity, and why the Catholic funeral liturgy matters in a distinct way. At a Catholic funeral we proclaim the resurrection, we place our trust in Christ, and we pray for the forgiveness and mercy the dead still need. That is also why we do not turn the rite into a staged tribute or a “celebration of life” that only highlights accomplishments. When we edit the truth to protect comfort, grief becomes awkward, hope becomes thin, and we end up praising the dead instead of praying for them.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Why Funerals Concern Me

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is living Catholic faith with Father Don Wolf. Now you're with Father Don Wolf.

Funerals And The Birth Of Humanity

The Rising Choice To Do Nothing

What A Catholic Funeral Proclaims

The Limits Of Eulogies

Why Families Avoid Funerals

Numbness And The Loss Of Tragedy

Resurrection As The Ground Of Hope

Choosing Funerals With Real Vigor

A Joke About Complaining

Closing And Where To Learn More

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. And this week it's time to talk about one of my grave concerns, which is when it comes to the life of the faith and how we go about our days in the church. And while there are many, many concerns, such as these today, I'd like to talk about one that affects all of us and is part of our ecclesial life everywhere, and is a concern, which is funerals. We need to understand what goes on in our funeral liturgies and why a funeral is a necessary part of life in Christ, as well as why we need to consider what we're doing when we gather to pray for those who have died. It's a surprisingly deep theological subject, one we've let go of in our day and time, because of our shallow understanding of living Christ's presence in the church. We should begin by acknowledging that funerals have been part of the human story from the beginning. That is, we know that our ancestors had crossed the threshold of human living from the wide expanse of animal existence when they began to bury their dead with ritual practice. When we begin digging among the remains of a place where it appears there was a colony or a campground of anthropoids, and we run across the remains of one of these creatures where the body was carefully placed and was surrounded by what appears to be memorials of his life or objects that might be needful in the afterlife, we know that these creatures were illuminated by the light bulb of consciousness. Rounding out the experience of life by preparations and burial is enough to show that however these creatures lived, they certainly experienced death in the way human beings do. Animals don't bury their dead. Often they don't do much more than walk away from them. It is the funeral experience that separates mere animality from soulful humanity, which is another way to state the obvious. Funerals are something important. They extend as far back as we know of for human living, and they give us an insight into our ancestors' makeup. They answer some of the questions we have about where we come from. For example, since we run across the graves of Neanderthals where the bodies have been carefully positioned and the tools and the artifacts of their lives surround them, we're confident we're dealing with a humanoid, intelligent, thinking species. They are our ancestors in some manner because of how they treated their dead. Certainly they are not merely human-like. They are us, in one of the most important ways we can imagine. Is it too much to say that funerals make us? Now, this is not proof of true faith or a pitch for belief in God, but it is an aspect of our humanity we're foolish to ignore. That is to say, if we've turned against the energy that gathers us around the grave, then there's something profoundly powerful happening in the agency of our humanness, something we probably should address, or at least pause to understand. If graves and rituals and mourning are nigh on a million years old and shine in the vast sky of our history, but we've decided they're neither meaningful nor purposeful, then we probably have some explaining to do. I guess the question might be, are we becoming more than human in this new age of ours, or less than human in our turning away from this past? Whichever it is, we should probably get busy answering. But we are turning away from funerals. More and more, when people die and we contact their families, we're told that there'll be no services of any kind. Or when we haven't heard from anyone and we finally make contact with the family, they tell us they've already buried mom or dad or grandmother, and there's no service, no nothing of any kind. This began as a blip on the horizon 20 years ago or so, an anomaly among the general practice of people. Now it's become an option on the list of what people choose. It's approaching something like a quarter of the people I know of who died. Their families choose not to do anything. Of course, we still presume that funerals are an important part of the life of the faithful Catholic. Everyone knows there ought to be some measure to round out the life of the one who's lived and then died in the church. It comes as a shock to discover that our presumptions are not engraved into the expectations of families who are facing the death of their loved ones. It's still new enough to come as a surprise, although I have to say that element of their choice is fading. We've come to expect it more and more that one of the things they'll say is we don't want to do anything. It follows a trend first noted in Europe, wouldn't you know, two generations ago. I read a novel by the celebrated French author Michel Wellbeck, first published in 1998, in which the main character decided not to organize a funeral for his father since there would be no one to go to it. When you began to understand that it was not written as satire, but was instead a serious note about life in contemporary France, it was a shocking admission of how awful things had become in French society. In our day and time, we've risen to the heights of Gallic practice as we ignore our connections to the dead and our responsibility to the living. This numbing of our humanity has now become as homemade as rap lyrics. We should analyze what's going on here. How can we have gotten to such a state so as to turn our backs on what we all know to be important and necessary to our role as decent people? As in any element of our society and every part of our common practice, there are lots of contributing factors. If we're going to change what we're doing, we need to understand why we're doing it. Or in this case, we need to understand why we've chosen to stop doing it. And the first element in this conundrum has to do with what we think we're doing when we gather for a funeral. Now, this was highlighted for me after Mass one Sunday at St. Eugene's a couple of years ago. An older man came out of Mass and he asked me about an announcement I had made about a funeral for one of our parishioners in the coming week. As part of letting everyone in the parish know what time it was scheduled for, I reminded them that as a parish, we gather and pray for our fellow parishioners when they die, and we do this best when we go to their funerals. In response to my reminder, he came out of Mass to tell me that he wasn't going to go to that funeral. It wasn't the kind of funeral he wanted to celebrate. Now, as you may know, when we gather for a Catholic funeral, we focus on the proclamation of the resurrection. It is of utmost importance that we be reminded of the great promise we have in Christ, and that our lives are not ultimately measured by how many years we've lived or by what we've accomplished. The final and greatest measure of our lives is our faithfulness to the gifts of God and our trust in the promise of Christ for our forgiveness and for our future. In the course of the prayers we offer, we pray for the one who's died that his or her sins be forgiven. This is the center of our faith. It's what forms us as a people. It's also what defines the life and the conf and what configures the death of the one who lies in state among us. Since we do this, it's not part of the funeral rite to spend a lot of time extolling the accomplishments of the one who has died. Rather than calling people up to the podium one after the other to tell us of all of the successes of the deceased's life, we focus on praying for forgiveness and recalling the brevity of our days. It's not forbidden to celebrate the goodness of a person and all that has taken place in his life, but it's not the heart of our funeral gatherings. This is also why we stay away from calling a funeral a celebration of life. If this is our description of what we're doing, then we only succeed in noting that our brother or sister's life is now over. By calling it a celebration of life, we only note how brief and tragic life really is. Instead, we gather to pray for the one who has died, enveloped by the promise of Christ for resurrection and transformation. In place of eulogies and homages and panegyrics, we have repentance, prayer, and petitions. Not only that, if we place telling the truth at the center of our gathering, after a while, either we decide to present only a particular version of the life of the one who has died, or we begin to say things that make us uncomfortable. Because the real truth we all know of every life is that it is a mixture of good and bad, a brew of grace and sin that shows itself in every aspect of the years that that person has had. We all understand that those who want to be present and remember the one who has died is so that they can conquer the tragedy of death by the beauty of life. But if the beauty of life is only the mask that we slap on the face of the one who has died, a mask reinforced by choosing to speak only of what is good and acceptable, then it's empty and false. And if speaking only of the good and the acceptable is what the celebration of life is, then not only is the celebration empty, so is the life. By speaking of sin and salvation through faith, repentance, and prayer, we then have the basis to hope, even though we know the whole truth of the one who has died. As I've said over and over, we have faith enough to tell all the stories from the life of the one who has died, not just some of them. The true gift of life is the gift shining through the muck and the dirt of years stained by brevity and weakness and failure. These jewels of beauty are found and identified and cut and polished so that they do glitter, but only by our trust that they are present, even though they are not obvious and easy to see. Our preaching is about the truth, not about what we'd like to say or are constrained to say when we just talk about what's good and beautiful in the person's life. Those are the insights at the foundation of our funeral liturgy. Christ came to save us because we cannot save ourselves. We celebrate his salvation by way of acknowledging the truth of ourselves and the truth of Jesus' gift. Since our lives have been wrapped in the gift of Christ, we have the courage to know every part can sparkle, no matter how plain. So this man who approached me and told me that he had been to a funeral of a friend of his at another church, and he was upset that we don't do as was done there. They got up and talked about all that he did, and all about how what a good man this one this person was. I don't like our funerals. In fact, I don't go to them anymore because you don't do that, he said. It was his condemnation of what goes on among us when we celebrate funerals. I told him I'd been to those kinds of funerals as well, and most of the time they sound really good. The only time I have a problem with them, I told him, is when I know the person they're talking about really well. The more I know of that person, the more I know about what they're not telling. In fact, a couple of times I've wanted to get up and tell them the real story about this person's life, not just the revised and edited versions everyone was being fed there. That's the chance you take, I said, when it becomes all about how good he was, rather than about the faith we share. And sometimes you just can't find anything good to say. Do any of us want to take the risk at our funerals? I don't think so. So the first element of those who choose not to bury their dead with a decent funeral is that we're surrounded by terrible ideas of what a funeral should be. Rather than praying for the dead, we praise them. Rather than focusing on the faith that gives our life meaning, we focus, we forget the meanness of life and leave faith off to the side. And rather than allowing ourselves to mourn the truth of the ones we love and how hard it can be to love them as thoroughly as we want to, both because we're so weak and because we are so weak and incapable of the love they deserve, or because their weakness made them so unlovable, we brush aside the starkness of life and choose silliness. When contemplating a funeral, many people simply opt not to have this kind of one. And since it's the only kind they know or have ever been exposed to, they choose not to have one at all. Secondly, this absence of funerals is a symptom of the emptiness of our faith. If we falter in our belief about redemption, then we don't have much reason to gather and to pray for the ones who've died. In fact, it is an aspect of our culture that has infected everything. Our generation shows it thoroughly. A quote from the Mexican cultural critic Octavio Paz highlights our situation. He was commenting on the differences between Anglos and Mexicans, and he wrote, quote, Americans think the world can be perfected. Mexicans think the world can be redeemed, unquote. The contrast between these two points of view is stark. A world that is to be perfected is one in which the fullness of life is the promise for every person. If we have a transcendent view of life and God's work is in our lives, then we believe every person who has died in the embrace of Christ is then perfected in every way and has entered into the fullness of God's embrace. Every person who dies in Christ is glorious in sanctity and intimate with God. But if we believe the world is redeemed, we know it to be the place where God is at work in the divine accompaniment of every person, and whose journey from life to death takes place amid the difficulties and indeterminateness of living. For such a person, amid the redemption of life, that person depends on God's mercy and goodness. He leans on the price of redeeming love. That person needs the prayers of everyone as he journeys toward the fullness of redemption. The funeral is the recognition of that need and the continuation of our prayers for this person that we know who has now died. We don't gather just to recall what his life has been. We gather to pray for what that person now faces as he sees the whole of his life, a life embraced by God's goodness, but a life still stark in its smallness, its brevity, and its error. Funerals are our help for the one who has died. A corollary of this conviction is that we have so little faith in the God of Revelation, we as a society have been convinced that God does not exist or that the divine existence means nothing. Often those are two sides of the same coin. We don't have funerals because lots of people have just given up on belief and feel no need to respond in any way to the transcendent part of life. For them, death is but the logical conclusion of our bodily functions that are time limited. Or there are those who believe in God, but that belief does not penetrate to any actual practice in life. They figure there is no substance to life other than the undeniable occasion of its existence, and so there's nothing to say once it's concluded. Gathering to pray means nothing in these circumstances, and so the dead are consigned to the forgetfulness of the living. And thirdly, our distance from funerals has to do with our disengagement from the tragedy of life. Now that may sound like an abstract point and a mere restatement of the previous point about the distance we have from God's purpose in our lives, but it's a category all of its own. If we live in a world in which we cannot experience tragedy, then we are unable to comprehend any measure of its presence among us. If that's the case, then life becomes numb and dull, both for those whom we know who have died, as well as for all of us as we are living. Life without tragedy is a life without picancy, which is a pretty accurate way to say or to describe the situation we find ourselves in. Remember what Andrew Sullivan said about the crisis of drug abuse in our society. As he reminded us, most of the people who overdose on drugs are dying not from the drugs that exhilarate and stimulate, but from those that numb and deaden. We find ourselves in a world of unbearable depression. If all of life is but stumbling through the days until the end, the end is no more than the day after the day before. Tragedy, on the other hand, is born from the promise of purpose. When life is surrounded by potential and enlivened by nobility, it carries with it the excitement of an unwrapped gift. Every day is glowing with what might be and with what could happen amid such potential. Stories are written about those who see such ability and act on it, who are blessed with such promise and can live such lives. But because we live in a fallen world, potential does not mean actuality, and promises can be betrayed. When the good that could happen or the promise that could be actualized is crushed, the heart of tragedy discloses itself. Knowing what could have been, we can mourn what is. We wounded ourselves, we sorrow at the wounds of others. Aware of how we've gone wrong and have surrounded ourselves with the ruins of our past, we gash ourselves when we see the ruins of others. Tragedy affects us all. But knowing the tragedy of living, if we trust life with promise, we come together to mourn what is lost as well as to gather up the remains left over. In the midst of tragedy, we recognize and celebrate the nobility of humanity. This is especially marked among us who remember the life and the death of Jesus. Our tragic ends find an echo in his life and death. All may have been less than we hoped, and certainly less than the world needs, but even in the most tragic of lives, there's a spark of nobility and goodness present to us. But if we've given up on lives of promise, if there is no true human greatness possible, or any real natural potential to be realized in life, then there is no tragedy. And since there is nothing to strive for, therefore there is nothing to be disappointed in. Many people have regarded every aspect of humanity to be accidental commentaries on what some people can do or what some people consider important, but these things have no real meaning and no real measurement. Among those people, there can be no nobilities, since there can be no tragedies. In this world without yardsticks, there is no reason to mourn another's passing or to gather at his death, since living and dying is just a matter of marking the days off the calendar until a person's heart stops and the breathing ceases. A world without tragedy produces a death without comment and a life without purpose. And finally, funerals begin to falter when we lose our sense of resurrection. That might seem counterintuitive since we only began to believe in resurrection from the revelation of Jesus. Certainly society's fixation on funerals began long before Easter Sunday. But in our society, which has been shaped by belief in resurrection, weakening that belief goes a long way to weakening the practices that are shaped and substantiated by it. As the foundations of our beliefs weaken, the walls built on them begin to buckle. It seems to be the case among us here. Resurrection into the life to come points us toward the fullest possible meanings of life. We are not an assemblage of days that wear out at about our eighty-third year. We are immortal creatures whose fullness of life will be realized only when we rise from the dead. Just as Jesus rose from the grip of death in the tomb, so we will rise to the fullness of all that God has for us. The promise inherent in this belief is evident. Our lives here and now are only the beginning of things for us. We are not merely male or female, or not merely Americans or Nigerians, we're not only engineers or carpenters. We are entrusted with immortality stretching beyond every boundary in each limitation. Resurrection promises us an immeasurable future so far beyond the moment that we can scarcely imagine all that it contains. This being the case, funerals are also the reminder that our mourning is the open gateway to the promise that the Lord has for us. Our tears are temporary and they give away to the brightness of Easter morning. Rather than the brevity of life and the temporaneity of our days, we have a future illimitable in its scope and in its promise. Gathering to remember this among us and celebrating its certainty. Is what our funerals are for. Once we give up on the picancy of resurrection, we have no reason to celebrate it. Once we stop celebrating it, we no longer hope for it. And without hope in it, we stop gathering to be hopeful in a downward spiral of abandonment and hopelessness. Those who give up on funerals are those who have decided that there's nothing to celebrate since there's nothing to hope for. Funerals matter in everything. This abandonment is a mark of our day and time. I hope it's temporary and that we can come to a full recovery of the importance of funerals and their necessary place in our society. Until then, we should embrace our opportunity to celebrate funerals. We should participate in them with all of the vigor that we can summon. They not only express our hope in God's goodness in the face of death, they sustain it. Back in just a moment. There's the old buddy Hackett joke about the kid who didn't talk. To everyone's consternation, he was silent throughout his childhood, not a word. Until, when he was eight, at supper one night he took a bite and said, This stew is terrible. Shock all around and relief. You're talking. Why haven't you said anything until now? And the kid replied, The food's been fine up to now. But this stew is awful. Guffaws and titters all around. Of course we know it isn't really this way, which is why we laugh. We are homoquins, not homoquerulous, but we know complaining is in our DNA. And we do lots of it. So why not laugh? Wouldn't we grumble if we didn't? That's complaining. Living Catholic is so comprehensive it extends from living to dying. I hope that in the weeks to come, that all of us together can continue to explore down to its foundations what it means to be.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.