Vatican relaxes rules for storing cremation ashes
The Vatican said Tuesday that Catholic families may request that “a minimum portion of a relative’s ashes” be kept in a place significant to the deceased, softening a previous mandate that ashes be kept only in “sacred spaces” such as cemeteries could be kept.
The instructions come seven years after the Vatican first issued them guidelines to respond to what she called an “unstoppable increase” in cremations. The guidelines ban the scattering of ashes ‘in the air, on land, at sea or otherwise’ and state that ashes should not be kept at home.
The new instructions allow families to keep a small portion of the ashes in a place that has meaning for the deceased “provided that any kind of pantheistic, naturalistic or nihilistic misunderstanding is excluded.” In accordance with 2016 rules, the remaining ashes were to be kept in a sacred place, the doctrinal office said, according to a note posted online. Vatican website.
The new rules also allow ashes to be mixed in a communal urn, as long as the identity of each deceased person is marked “so as not to lose the memory of their names.”
The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church teaches that “the bodies of the dead are to be treated with respect and charity, in faith and hope of the resurrection,” preferring burial or entombment in the ground. Cremation was first permitted in 1963, and permitted as long as it was not done for reasons contrary to Christian teaching.
The statement was signed on Tuesday by the Vatican’s doctrinal leader, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández of Argentina, and approved by Pope Francis. It came in response to questions from Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the president of the Italian bishops’ conference, who was seeking “a Christian answer” to meet a growing number of questions from people asking for their loved ones to be cremated and their ashes buried in to scatter nature.
Laws about cremation and the storage of ashes vary from country to country. In Italy it is legal to scatter ashes, according to the will of the deceased, in areas that local authorities have approved for such a purpose.
In response to Cardinal Zuppi, the Vatican upheld a 2016 regulation that ashes be kept “in a holy place” to ensure they will be prayed for and to prevent “the faithful departed from being forgotten,” and to prevent that “some inappropriate or superstitious practices,” but allowed a “minimal portion” to be thrown away as the family requested.
The Vatican has not commented on newer forms of disposal of human remains. A gain popularity in North America is a liquefaction process known as alkaline hydrolysis. Another is human composting.
In March, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Commission on Doctrine released a proposal rack “providing principles for evaluating” these two techniques, concluding that they “fail to meet the Church’s requirements for proper respect for the bodies of the dead,” it said.
Over the years, individual dioceses and bishops’ conferences have also issued guidelines. The Archdiocese of St. Louis concluded that alkaline hydrolysis “in current practice violates the dignity of the deceased human person” and called on Catholics to avoid it “until another suitable means of disposing of the liquid remains can be found.”
In 2019, the Texas Catholic Bishops’ Conference tried to block a bill that would have allowed the procedure, arguing it failed to “treat the dead with respect.”