Cremation is a pagan practice. This is another of the wonderful modernist ideas.
From the Remnant of May 15th, 2007:
From her very beginning, the Church condemned cremation and had only one funeral rite: burial. This practice was based on religious reasons, and was in direct opposition to the practices of the pagan world. Even when the pagans, as a sign of their contempt for the Christian rites, burned the bodies of the martyrs and violated the graves in Christian cemeteries, the Church held firmly to the rite of burial, and propagated it everywhere she went. So much so, that by the end of the 4th century burial had replaced cremation in the whole Roman Empire.
When sometime after the year 1000 A.D. a practice bearing certain resemblances to cremation took hold in Europe, Pope Boniface VIII, in his letter Detestandae Feritatis (1299), condemned the practice as “abominable” in the sight of God and men and imposed automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication on all who chose such a procedure and on all who practiced it, and deprived of a Catholic funeral the body that had been submitted to this procedure.
For centuries after this there were no further abuses and the Church consequently had no need to speak out.
In the wake of the French Revolution (1789) there was launched a campaign in favor of cremation, which campaign was supported, if not planned and directed, by the Freemasons for openly anti-Christian reasons: cremation of the body stood for the complete annihilation of the human person at death and thus, for “freedom” from the traditional teaching of the Church with regard to the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
Once again, the Church reacted immediately and decisively to defend the Christian tradition of burial. Several condemnations were issued by the Holy Office – May 19, 1886; December 15,1886; July 27, 1892; August 3, 1897 – which all spoke of cremation as a “detestable abuse”, and imposed heavy penalties on all who chose to be cremated, as also on those who executed their wishes, forbidding them the sacraments, Christian burial, etc…
In 1917 the Code of Canon Law, signed by Pope Benedict XV, codified the Catholic tradition of burial and the severe sanctions incurred by those who broke with this tradition. It prescribed burial, forbade cremation, and declared null and void the will of a Christian who asked to be cremated (Can. 1203, #1), depriving such a one of a Church burial and of all memorial Masses, even on the anniversary of Death (Can. 1241).
In 1926 an instruction from the Holy Office warned against a resurgence of the practice of cremation, confirmed the doctrine of the Catholic Church regarding burial and renewed the decrees of 1886. One of these degrees – May 19, 1886 – had defined burial as “the constant practice, consecrated by the solemn rites of the Church.”
The first break with this uninterrupted tradition, which the Church had defended with severe sanction down through the centuries, came under Pope Paul VI, and was one of the first acts of his pontificate. On July 15, 1963, an instruction from the Holy Office “while retaining these condemnations in cases where cremation was inspired by anti-Catholic or anti-religious motives, no longer requires that they be applied in other cases, presuming that recourse could be had to cremation for upright reasons, having nothing to do with anti-dogmatic or anti-Christian feeling”.
However, it is clear from the history of this question, that the “anti-dogmatic” or “anti-Christian” reasons for cremation in modern times were but secondary and transient motives for its ecclesiastical interdiction. At the time when Boniface VIII intervened with Destestandae Feritatis, the practice resembling cremation to which the body of St. Louis had been subjected, did not spring from any anti-Christian mentality, but was had recourse to for “upright” reasons, namely, the desire to find a more practical way of transporting the mortal remains of important personages. Nevertheless, the Church intervened with a rigorous reminder of her condemnation of cremation. Furthermore, the third decree from the Holy Office, July 27, 1892, against the cremationist campaign of the Freemasons, declared “…unworthy of the Last Sacraments those who arrange for the cremation of their body for irreligious reasons, as well as those who do so for reasons of another order”.
Link for the entire article:
remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/archive-2007-church_and_cremation.htm
