Thinking About Green Burial

St. Anthony the Great had a problem. He was 105 years old, he lived in fourth-century Egypt, and he was famous.

He did not want to be embalmed. But the common practice at the death of eminent personages such as himself was to preserve them, pose them on couches, and to keep them in their houses.

This was intended to honor the deceased.

Anthony knew that some of his fellow hermits might try something like that. So shortly before his death, he reminded them that the bodies of the patriarchs and prophets are preserved in tombs, and the very body of the Lord was laid in a tomb.

St. Athanasius, who reported these words of Anthony, concluded that not burying the dead was wrong. And so even in Egypt, burial became the normal way Christians treated their dead.

St. Anthony became the patron saint of gravediggers.

The American way of death

Today, some of us face a similar problem, discomfort with the impersonal nature of what has been called “the American way of death.”

From the hospital where most are likely to die, the body is whisked away to the funeral home where it is typically embalmed, then ferried to the parish church for the Funeral Mass and the cemetery for the committal. (Or alternatively from the church to the crematory, and then to the cemetery.)

Increasingly, people also wonder about the environmental impact of these burial practices.

Is it good for our drinking water and soil to bury three gallons of embalming fluid and a casket coated with noxious chemicals in a reinforced concrete vault that will leach it out for years to come?

Or is it right to cremate, which releases about the same emissions as two full tanks of gas?

Catholics are not wrong to consider the environmental impact of their burial.

Green burial

Our present culture discusses these issues under the heading of “green burial”.

Although some contemporary “green” ideas for handling human remains are manifestly incompatible with our faith, there’s nothing un-Catholic or untraditional about the central concept.

The practice of much of the non-English-speaking world offers a good example of a better way: Most people in the world die at home rather than the hospital, are washed by relatives and friends, wrapped in a shroud, laid out at home for the vigil, carried by friends and relatives to the church for the funeral Mass, and then to the cemetery for burial, all within three days.

This order of proceeding respects the dead and offers the living the comfort of concrete human expressions of their grief. At the same time, it avoids unnecessary harm to the environment — not to mention unnecessary expense to the family.

The first such green burial I attended was moving. The matriarch of the family was wrapped first in a shroud, and outside that in a quilt made by her children. She was laid on a trundle — a wide plank with six ropes attached.

Without a heavy casket, six family members easily carried her from the hearse to the grave, which was open and did not have the lowering device we use with caskets. The family members carefully walked three on either side of the grave, and then lowered her into the ground. The ropes were all-natural and were also placed in the grave.

After the family departed, I asked the funeral director for some further details. The deceased had not been embalmed but had been cooled. There had been no viewing, no open casket. Our cemeteries normally require vaults to guard against settling, but these are not necessary in a green burial.

Catholic considerations

There are other green burial practices offered today that place environmental and sentimental concerns ahead of fidelity.

Like the hermits who would have posed a mummified St. Anthony on a couch, the intention is to honor the dead, but the following methods fall short of how we are called to follow Jesus:

• Composting pitched as a natural alternative to burial or cremation. Some like the idea of using composted human remains as fertilizer, but this method has more to do with the “circle of life” bound to this world than the resurrection of the body to everlasting life.
  
  
• Alkaline hydrolysis. A bill was introduced in the Wisconsin Assembly last year to authorize this method, sometimes called “water cremation”. However, this method is not cremation at all but is a way of chemically dissolving the body, and the Wisconsin Catholic Conference successfully opposed the authorization of this method of treating human remains.

I should also mention that cremated remains must be brought to a cemetery for burial. Anything other than that — scattering, retaining at home, etc. — falls short of the respect we owe to the bodies of our beloved dead, and fails to communicate our hope in the resurrection.

There are many options for addressing the needs of the deceased, and many of them are compatible with the faith. But our starting point should be the “Catholic way of death”.

Taking our cues from St. Anthony, our belief in the resurrection of the body and our desire to follow the example of the Lord can guide our choices of how we care for our dead.