Sacrilege or not?

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That is not necessarily true. What we know is that no one is damned thru no fault of their own. It seems reasonable that many people have heard of Jesus and his Church, yet are unable to accept them die to invincible ignorance, eg cultural factors that prevent them from even looking into the details of the Catholic faith, much less consider the Truths of the faith.
 
Is a funeral for the living? I thought the purpose of a Catholic funeral was for the living to pray for the soul of the deceased, not to have a New Age mish-mash. Why does everyone have to feel that they contributed? To a religious ritual of a religion that they don’t belong to? If I went to a friend’s Buddhist, or Jewish, etc funeral, I wouldn’t expect them to accommodate people outside their faith. I’m a one-time visitor, why would I expect that I had something meaningful to contribute to their religious ritual?

www.catholicworldreport.com

Catholic Funerals and the True Perspective of Faith

www.catholicworldreport.com www.catholicworldreport.com
 
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As several people have already answered you on the “no salvation” point, I would just add that Buddhist salvation is off topic here. The person who died wasn’t Buddhist.

And those monks, by offering their prayers and well-wishes to a deceased Catholic, are actually engaging in some degree of communion with the Catholic Church. Who knows, perhaps that will help them in their ultimate salvation.
 
Ah. It makes even less sense then, honestly. The funeral should reflect the beliefs of the deceased and not those of the daughter-in-law.
 
Here are Buddhist beliefs on death, and let’s not forget, rebirth.
Why anyone would want someone chanting unknown texts, possibly related to reincarnation, at a Catholic funeral, is a mystery to me:
In [Buddhism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism), death marks the transition from this life to the next for the deceased.
Among Buddhists, death is regarded as an occasion of major religious significance, both for the deceased and for the survivors. For the deceased, it marks the moment when the transition begins to a new mode of existence within the round of rebirths. When death occurs, all the karmic forces that the dead person accumulated during the course of his or her lifetime become activated and determine the next rebirth. For the living, death is a powerful reminder of the Buddha’s teaching on impermanence; it also provides an opportunity to assist the deceased person as he or she fares on to the new existence.[1] BuddhaNet has published a guidance article about the subject,[2] which also discusses the traditions of different Buddhist schools.[3] There are also several academic reviews of this subject.[4][5]
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Buddhist funeral - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Loud-living-dogma said:
Is a funeral for the living? I thought the purpose of a Catholic funeral was for the living to pray for the soul of the deceased, not to have a New Age mish-mash. Why does everyone have to feel that they contributed? To a religious ritual of a religion that they don’t belong to? If I went to a friend’s Buddhist, or Jewish, etc funeral, I wouldn’t expect them to accommodate people outside their faith. I’m a one-time visitor, why would I expect that I had something meaningful to contribute to their religious ritual?
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For many, if not most, people a funeral is a final good bye. I realize there is more to it than that for Catholics. However, plenty of non-Catholic people attend Catholic funerals. It is nice to do what you can at a time like that for others who are suffering. It is nice to do what you can to offer them some relief from their pain. That is all I was saying. It isn’t about what anyone expects. It is about what can be done to care for your fellow, living, human beings.
 
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If that happened at my funeral Mass. I’d haunt those who arranged it.
 
I agree with you and am taking the hard line on this one. Why should a Catholic funeral include Buddhist chants even to accommodate a family member?
 
Funerals are also there to give comfort to the living who are mourning. Maybe the deceased was close to the daughter in law and wanted her to be comforted?
 
Loud-living-dogma said:
Why? On what occasions would we try to accommodate their beliefs in the context of our rites and celebrations? Are other religious traditions all of a sudden incorporating Catholic beliefs? Why would they?
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Well funerals for a start - a lot of leeway is afforded at funerals because it’s a difficult time for the family and they don’t need a priest to make it more difficult than it is already. Besides this, funerals are an opportunity for evangelisation given that it’s often one of few times when people are exposed to Catholicism and so it’s important to make the most of the opportunity. We do this by accommodating the family’s wishes in so far as possible. with the hope being that those who are fallen away from the faith or who have had a limited (at best) amount to do with it in the past will go away with a favourable impression. Sadly, there are far too many horror stories from funerals where the priest was unwilling to budge, leaving the family feeling upset and, in many cases, angry.

Of course that doesn’t mean anything goes - there are obviously limits - but it does mean actually making an effort at including people - especially those who aren’t Catholic or Christian. Whether another faith would extend us the same courtesy is irrelevant after all, kindness and decency is supposed to be conditional on reciprocity!
 
InThePew said:
Sadly, there are far too many horror stories from funerals where the priest was unwilling to budge, leaving the family feeling upset and, in many cases, angry.
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And an angry family can, and did, severely damage the career of the most powerful cardinal of his time, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla. In the 1903 conclave, he was a shoo-in for becoming the next pope, and easily would have had his candidacy not been vetoed by Emperor Franz Josef, who held a massive grudge against against Rampolla for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to his son, who had committed suicide.

Instead, Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto was elected as Pope Pius X.
 
Buddhist beliefs about death are categorically different than Catholic beliefs. Buddhist chants are not appropriate in a Catholic church, or as any part of a Catholic funeral, or at the graveside. I would be seriously weirded out by Buddhist chants at the funeral home or at the house, but at least that would be a secular setting. You could make an argument for non-Catholic chants outside church after a funeral; but really, that would go against Catholic tradition too, because the early Christian tradition was for all the funeral attendees to be singing hymns the whole time during the funeral procession to the grave.

I found out the probable content. In Thai Buddhism “the custom is to recite the mātikās to the seven books of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, a practice that’s aimed at the benefit of the deceased rather than the people attending the funeral. The underlying belief is that the spirit of the deceased is hanging around the coffin and needs to be urged to go and get reborn. And so the chanting of the Abhidhamma is aimed at informing the spirit that the rūpadhammas that make up its corpse are no use to it anymore and so it’s time to let go of attachment to it and move on.”

Catholics do not believe in reincarnation rebirth. They do not believe that the soul abandons the body, but rather that the body will be reunited with the soul and resurrected on the Last Day. They do not treat the body as some kind of worthless husk, but rather as a holy thing created by God and destined for immortality. And we sure as heck do not agree with the Abhidhamma Pitaka’s “theology” and arguments.

This was not an ecumenical gesture. This was the priest saying, “Okay, I’m cool with a corps of non-Catholic religious figures, formally denying every tenet of Catholicism and promoting their own beliefs, in church, right in front of the deceased who is hopefully a saint or a saint in Purgatory. Because really, Catholicism isn’t true and doesn’t matter, so it’s all the same thing as long as the widow is happy and it’s purty moozick.”

That said, I’m sure the priest didn’t realize what the monks were going to sing, and he probably was just trying to be nice and accommodating. And the widow may or may not have realized how much she was violating her husband’s beliefs; heck, the husband may not have objected in life, if he was not a very savvy Catholic. But it was not right, even though it could have done no harm to the deceased.
 
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InThePew said:
Besides this, funerals are an opportunity for evangelisation given that it’s often one of few times when people are exposed to Catholicism and so it’s important to make the most of the opportunity.
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This. I’m a pastor, I conduct funerals, and for many, many people this is the only contact with any Christian church – or even with the Christian faith – they’ve had in a while.

Being pastoral and compassionate, allowing things you probably wouldn’t consider for a Sunday service, trying to take into account, as well as you can, the needs of the grieving relatives, is one of the most powerful ways we have to be witnesses of the Gospel to our contemporaries, in a time when they desperately need God’s tenderness (even if they often don’t realize it).
 
Mintaka said:
That said, I’m sure the priest didn’t realize what the monks were going to sing, and he probably was just trying to be nice and accommodating.
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You don’t have any idea what the priest knew or didn’t know and for that matter you have no idea what the monks chanted.

Your whole post is speculation.
 
Emperor Franz Joseph also vetoed the election of Cardinal Rampolla because he had evidence that Rampolla was a Freemason. C.f. Martin, Malachi. The Keys of This Blood.
 
But is it effective, in your experience? I personally would think it’s weird if I went to a Catholic funeral (if I weren’t Catholic), and everything but the kitchen sink was thrown into the service. Maybe a true beautiful and authentic Catholic funeral liturgy (rather than a watered down New Age extravaganza) would be effective evangelization. Don’t people trust the church to know what is effective and meaningful?
After all you might get dissatisfied visitors some Sunday at Mass saying “Hey – where are the chanting Buddhist monks?!” 🤣
 
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