Regular readers know I am a harsh critic of cremation and of the Church’s misconceived 1963 decision to tolerate it. I have repeatedly argued that that 1963 rescission of the prohibition on cremation allowed the camel to poke its nose under the tent, upending the latter. The most cursory survey of current funerary practice reveals that Catholics resort to cremation at a rate similar to the larger population.

The same has been said about contraception, too. Which makes me wonder what they might have in common.

The rationale for the Holy Office’s 1963 change-of-practice was a series of contingent assumptions tied to an intention. The contingent assumptions were that (i) we were in the midst of a “population explosion” and (ii) that overpopulation would make land for burial increasingly rare. (Of course, we are not overpopulated and we are chary about burial grounds for reasons other than people need it). Against that neo-Malthusian vision, the Holy Office argued that the original prohibition against cremation entered into force because Masons and atheists, especially in France, were resorting to cremation to make a statement against the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. “I dare you, God, to put that back together.” Inasmuch as those who wanted to cremate in the 1960s were generally not driven by doctrinal opposition, the original stricture was eased. It was not repealed. It was encircled with all sorts of caveats: “as long as one was not denying doctrine,” “where such practices are necessary because of limited ground,” “earth burial remains the preferred Christian form of burial,” and so on.

Like with the U.S. bishops’ gutting of Friday abstinence, all those caveats and stipulations in practice ceased to exist. And the Church—especially her “pastoral” types—refuses to draw lessons from those experiences.

If you primarily understand the reason for the Church’s opposition to cremation as reaction to a particular set of contingent circumstances that no longer generally apply, then many people will conclude that cremation in and of itself is just another way of handling a dead body. Such a conclusion may be a logical fallacy, but it exists. It leads to people believing there is essentially nothing different between interment and cremation except, perhaps, reasons one might resort to one rather than the other.

But the Church did not accept cremation prior to when French Masons decided to make it their “performance art” in support of their doctrinal issues. The Church never treated cremation as “just another way” of handling a dead body.

That is, perhaps, because the Church instinctively recognized that the very act of cremation said something independently of the intentions of those who resorted to it. That act was predominant among pagans. It said something about the value — or rather, lack of value — of a dead body. The body was now useless, a husk shed, something from which the “spirit” was freed. At best, these material remains should be “spiritualized.” That’s why Vikings burned their chiefs and ships: either the dust somehow made its way to Valhalla or else there was no need to keep these things. There is clearly a flavor of dualism in the practice.

In other words, cremation seems associated with a particular anthropology, a particular understanding of the body-soul relationship in the person, that is extremely difficult to square with the Catholic one.

I’ve repeatedly contrasted interment to burial. We bury what is valuable, what needs protection. One servant in a parable buries his talent; one servant in another parable digs up a buried treasure. “Buried treasure” is, indeed, a regular motif in our culture and literature. We burn what is not valuable, what is garbage or useless. We burn what is dangerous, pathological, or infectious to “sterilize” our environment from its impact. We bury treasure; we burn trash.

And, no matter how slick the funerary brochure, no matter how many eyes clerical bureaucrats roll, no matter how much we rationalize, I would argue that there is a visceral human awareness of that difference and those meanings.

In 1997, Peter Jupp and Tony Rogers — people supportive of cremation — wrote a too-unnoticed book, Interpreting Death: Christian Theology and Pastoral Practice. These Protestants admit that cremation poses real issues for multiple skeins of Christian doctrine, including anthropology, spirituality, and eschatology, whose implications we have not thought through in our technical acceptance of cremation as a (cheaper) way of dealing with corpses. In 2012 Damien Le Guay, writing from a French and more Catholic focus, made the same argument in La mort en cendres [Death in Ashes]. Le Guay argues that, at least in a European context, cremation was always the “pagan way in death” whose uncritical assimilation by Catholics posed deep issues with which we had not reckoned.

Like contraception, cremation requires we grapple with the reality of embodiment. Both pose the question: Is there anything more to this flesh than the physical?

Contraceptive advocates claimed the Church’s opposition to contraception stemmed from “physicalism,” from pure respect of bodily processes rather than the thinking “person.” Their anthropology was essentially Cartesian, not Catholic: a “person” (i.e., mind) with a tool called a “body” attached. The realities of that body, such as fertility, were not human goods that expressed the Creator’s design; they were just “rhythms” whose “regulation” could be effected by the “person” (i.e., “reason”).

As the Church has repeatedly affirmed, this is not a Catholic philosophical, much less theological, anthropology.

If the human goods of the human body are, however, personal, as Catholic anthropology would hold, then the central teaching of Humanae vitae — that man “on his own initiative” may not destroy those goods — is clear. There is, therefore, also a difference between periodic abstinence (i.e., engaging in sexual intercourse when those goods are not present) and contraception (i.e., actively destroying those goods). It is the fundamental difference between action and omission.

I think a similar distinction also exists with relation to cremation. Is this body just a piece of rotting flesh with which something must be done? Or, even though dead, does it remain the body of a human being, in which once human life (and the life of grace) dwelled, making it — even in death — in some sense sacred and worthy of respect? Even our civil laws prescribe some modicum of respect for cadavers, e.g., one cannot simply put Uncle Joe in a Hefty trash bag for curb pickup. That rule is not just for public health reasons. It exhibits a cultural norm. You can learn a lot about a culture in how it treats its dead.

The Christian who buries the body spiritually wants to imitate His Master, Christ, who also lay in a tomb. But, even on a human level, he buries something that was treasured, that was sacred, that was holy. He recognizes that those qualities remain even in death. Normal processes of decay will break down that body, but he allows those normal processes to follow their course.

Cremation seems to articulate a wholly different message. Whatever this body might have been, it is now a biohazard, whose disposal is a technical question. Cremation eliminates that biohazard quickly and efficiently. It reduces deleterious environmental impact. There’s nothing “special” about the natural decay of the body, therefore, and there’s nothing objectionable for man, “on his own initiative,” to hurry that process along, whether it be for compact funeral purposes (cremation) or to produce otherwise “useful” products like topsoil from this now useless biomass (alkaline hydrolysis, recomposting). In short, whatever “value” that body might have had is calculated and found wanting against its continued existence and/or potential useful repurposing. In that view there is nothing different, then, in human technical intervention to achieve — in a more compact timeframe — what natural decay might over years or decades.

It’s the act versus omission distinction.

I welcome further reflection on this question, as I believe the December 9 Note from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith [here] further loosening ecclesiastical restrictions on cremation continues this not-thought-out approach to human incineration.