Do Eulogies Belong in Catholic Funerals ?
By James Hitchcock Eulogies, defined as speeches praising a person who has died, should not be given at Catholic funerals, according to Archbishop Seán Brady, president of the Irish bishops’conference (in a letter released in March, 2000). Official liturgical directives do not allow them, except for brief personal remarks following Mass. When I was growing up I attended hundreds of funerals, as a server and a choir boy. All them were in the same church, most of them conducted by the same priest, who year after year preached the same sermon, which was to remind the mourners that they too would die and should be prepared to do so, and to urge them to pray for the soul of the deceased. What more needed to be said? Archbishop Brady thinks that eulogies detract from the Mass itself and are often seen as the real center of the liturgy. In the process the Christian meaning of death is obscured. The main problem with eulogies is that they have to be unreservedly positive — no one wants to hea
