Funeral for a Friend
At the beginning of last week, early on Sunday morning, I received one of those texts you do not want to get. It bought news that my former colleague in Congress, Tim Murphy, had died the night before. I had hosted Tim at my farm in the hills of western Pennsylvania just weeks earlier. He looked as fit as ever. We talked about our respective families and recent activities, including his continuing work at the intersection of veterans and mental health. As fate would have it, it was our last conversation.
A week later, family and friends filled Resurrection Parish in Pittsburgh’s South Hills for Tim’s funeral Mass. A priest friend recently told me that fewer Catholics nowadays are choosing funeral Masses for their loved ones. Instead, they opt for a shortened service at a funeral home, or a celebration of life at a restaurant or club. I thought of that as I saw Tim’s casket in the church and considered how blessed he was (as I hope I will be) to have a family make sure he received the most ancient of farewells.
The Second Book of Maccabees counsels that “it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead.” That is what Catholics do at a funeral Mass: we pray for the soul who has passed, we pray for the family left behind, and we thank God for the gift of life and for the grace that saves every sinner who accepts the offering.
The funeral Mass includes the Church’s highest act of worship, where the priest re-presents Christ’s sacrifice of his body and blood as payment for sin. At a funeral, the reverence within the Mass extends to the deceased’s own body — a body that God knit together in a mother’s womb and in which the Holy Spirit once dwelt. Upon arrival at the church, the casket is sprinkled with holy water, recalling baptism. At Mass’s end, it is blessed again, this time with incense, symbolizing prayers and the soul that rise to God. All this was done for former Congressman Tim Murphy, and it is available to all Catholics — because before God, status, position, and wealth mean nothing. We have all sinned and fall short of God’s glory, and we are all, every one of us, in need of a savior. There is comfort in this sameness: the same words and rites, the same hope, offered to congressman, carpenter and caregiver alike.
Why has the funeral Mass become less common? Much has been written about the broader decline in religious practice in America, and that decline has surely touched how we bury our dead. For a century, mass media, Hollywood, and academia have treated religious practice as something to be outgrown. And we have witnessed governmental hostility towards faith, such as, for example, when presidents and governors threaten Catholic nuns with ruinous fines when they refuse to engage in practices that violate their faith. Religious institutions have hardly helped their own case either, from the scandal of clergy sex abuse to a broader drift from settled belief and practice. Given all that, it is little wonder some families have abandoned the funeral Mass along with much else.
But today we also see signs of renewal, especially within the Catholic Church. A new generation of apologists is carrying the gospel through modern media, and the number of converts is surging. Perhaps this revival will lead to more Catholic families electing funeral Masses for their loved ones, which as the Murphy family and everyone in the church witnessed, offers a solemn and sacred opportunity to hand Tim over to God formally and with great hope.
The Psalms remind us that “our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures.” Tim made it about half-way between those numbers. As we consider our own days, and years, may we spend fewer of them judging, and more of them encouraging, one another to take the offer that is still on the table: the one that takes away the punishment for sin and allows us into eternal life.
(Congressman Keith Rothfus served 3 terms in the U.S. House. He is a Notre Dame Law School graduate living near Pittsburgh where he and his wife raised their family.)
