Bad funeral....
In a first for me, I felt the necessity to call a funeral director afterwards and apologize.
I had vented a bit on the sidewalk in front of the church immediately after the funeral.The regret I felt was for bothering him, (certainly not for intruding on the grief of people, whose method of mourning was to blow noise makers, so they couldn't have heard me, anyway.)
The funeral had begun over 40 minutes late (the funeral home is two blocks from the church.)
And after my sitting on the bench playing and leading FIFTY MINUTES OF PRELUDE MUSIC (boy, is my improv in e flat gettin' good, into Nimrod, out of requiem eternam, a whisper of SLANE, ...,) the Mass nearly over, and my thinking I can't wait to get to the rest room out of this frigid loft and to some food, in that order, Father said, there is an announcement, and to Father's obvious surprise, said "announcement" turned out to be a eulogy, and before the first eulogist finished another moved to the ambo to add his 3 cents.
Some of it was unintelligible for the sobbing, but some of it was jokes... it is so edifying when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is used as a warm-up to a roast.
And I was already steamed because in single digit weather some members of the choir don't see any good reason not to stand at an open the window in the loft counting cars....
Anyway, at the funeral director's request I have printed out what the Instruction General has to say about eulogies.
Chapter VIII
Masses and Prayers for Various Circumstances and Masses for the Dead
II. Masses for the Dead
para. 382. At the Funeral Mass there should, as a rule, be a short homily, but never a eulogy of any kind.
Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...
2 comments:
I had a horrible funeral as well a while ago. We had a guest priest from the happy-clappy folk church down the road (while my boss was on vacation; he was furious the guy was brought in) who didn't follow a SINGLE rubric. And his homily was long, incoherent, and filled with random giggling. Oh, and it was also filled with quasi-heretical folk devotion ("the baby Jesus and Mary are coming to lift her up to heaven") as well as flat out heresy ("at Mass we will not only offer Jesus Christ for our sins, but also the deceased"!!) And THEN it ended with a eulogy, as you mentioned incoherent through the crying. Except we all heard the eulogist mention how her aunt BOUGHT HER HER FIRST OUIJI BOARD!! If I were a priest, I probably would have stood up and said "and that concludes the homily." Then again, I wouldn't have allowed it in the first place!
And on top of all this, I later got a complaint because I chanted the Requiem propers (no one was singing and I figured since the priest is joking around SOMEONE should do things right) and I just said "I'm sorry you're upset, but if the priest would have known what he was doing, I wouldn't have been confused about what's going on." Anyway it's still less painful than a wedding...
You have some serious personal issues evidently and no respect for the family of the deceased. Each grieves in there own way and I trust they weren't using duck calls in the church. Are you jealous perhaps that when your time comes there won't be anyone to eulogize you? I sense that could be the case.
You also are probably the kind of person that is still hoping communion rails come back. Its 2008 not 1958.
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