For many reasons I am grateful God gave me the grace of being Catholic. One reason is the Catholic funeral liturgy. Watching the funeral of Jimmy Carter, I realized the profound difference between the Catholic understanding of what we do at a funeral and Protestant/civil religion/secular funerals. I don’t want the latter, please. To me, the most obvious difference is focus. The Catholic focus is on God; the Protestant/civil religion/secular focus is on the deceased.

This is obvious in the “eulogy.” Catholic liturgists are adamant that eulogies are not appropriate at Catholic funerals, and I agree. Yes, people want to remember the “good things” about somebody. But that’s not what is important. In any event, that’s God’s problem and His memory is both omniscient and non-selective.

Hymns should not be background music for funereal movements.

What’s important is that the deceased needs our prayers. If what we say at death — “he’s gone to a better place,” “he’s in heaven,” “he’s with God” — truly means something and is more than verbal fluff, then we should not be presuming on a man’s fate. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31). I’ll stick with Scripture, even if today’s “pastoral types” prefer to buffer the message.

There is something eloquent in the ritual for burial of a Hapsburg Emperor. The emperors are buried in the Capuchin Church in Vienna. When the procession arrives at the church, whose doors are closed, the leader knocks at the door and announces the arrival of the deceased with all his political titles. He’s told “we don’t know you.” He knocks a second time and announces various other honors, only to receive the same answer. Only the third time, when he is announced as a “poor sinner,” is the door opened and he is welcomed in.

That ritual conveys a profound truth about what a funeral is for.

Ritual and ceremony are important. They testify to our institutions and honor the deceased. But the deceased is only a temporary part of those institutions; the institutions perdure but their incumbent, like the grass — as Scripture reminds us — is gone. If we are truly to make a funeral an act of loving respect for one whose life we believe is “changed, not ended,” then charity demands we move the focus from self-celebration to humble petition. I have to admit that the most religious content among any of the eulogists may have come from Joe Biden.

One of our latter mystics — Anne Catherine Emmerich, I think — once observed that Protestants are particularly impoverished by the fact that their founders all rejected the idea of suffrages for the dead. Adhering to that theology means no commitment to suffrages for the dead. The consequences of that rejection include the question of what to do at a funeral. The answer appears to be: almost everything except pray (except, perhaps, in a celebratory fashion). And that’s why the focus necessarily shifts away from petition to “celebration.”

That, too, tends to shift other things. One television commentator asked why it seemed people were not in mourning clothes in the Rotunda ceremony. The answer given was “this is a celebration” of the former president’s life. How much has today’s sense of mourning shrunk? What do “thirty days of mourning” mean in reality to most people, except for the immediate family and the guy who raises the flag over a building every day?

While we often hear the phrase “funerals are a celebration of life,” let me voice a note of dissent. A funeral is not a history lesson, especially a “history” lesson served up with a dollop of sugar, honey, and soap bubbles before one’s eyes. Yes, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. But a funeral should not be about the past: the past is finished, done, closed. Good, bad, or indifferent, that life is closed and it seems presumptuous to focus on telling God just how good somebody is. He knows.

As a Catholic, I’d insist a funeral is about the future: about one’s eternity and what we, as the communion of saints, can still contribute to our brother’s welfare. And unless we think “all dogs and people go to heaven,” we might still reckon with the fact that universalism has been for Christians a heresy, not a dogma.

So, let us not forget the need for prayer, prayer most especially for the one who has fallen into the hands of the Living God. Because there is nothing more important.