I’m dismayed by the Vatican’s edict on ashes
SIR – Although I am not as educated in the ways of the Church as some of your contributors clearly are, I nevertheless try to be the best Catholic I can, but all too often fall short of this ideal. There may well be good theological reasons why clarification on the disposal of ashes of the dead has been brought into the public spotlight but frankly I find the document intrusive and hurtful.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who presented the text, says that to scatter or store the ashes in anywhere other than an approved sacred place gives the appearance of pantheism, naturalism or nihilism. But I do not even know what these words mean. Nor, I suspect, do many of my contemporaries. He also says that to store or scatter the ashes would deprive the whole Christian community of remembering the dead, and I say most definitely that it would not.
