Cremation: good or bad?
The practice of cremating bodies after death is not new, but it has become more popular in recent years for various reasons mostly because it is somewhat less expensive than full-body burial. The Church used to oppose it in years gone by. In those times it was always the pagan peoples who burned the body because they did not believe in the Resurrection of the dead and believed the body had no moral significance.
The Church allows cremation but favors full-body burial as the best way to show respect for the mortal remains of our loved ones. It allows cremation as long as the people truly believe in the Resurrection of the body. Christ rose in bodily form and so will we, on the Last Day. And we will be in heaven like Jesus in our human bodies, though as St. Paul teaches, those bodies will be transformed in a way we can’t now understand.
Christians have always embraced the goodness of the human body as an essential part of who we are and rejected the pagan idea we are just spirits trapped in a material body for a time. So the body has dignity and value given by God and we need to treat the body in life and after death with great respect. That’s why we never scatter the ashes of a person or pour them into the sea, keep them at home, or put them into jewelry or other such abuses. We always treat them with the utmost reverence and bury them as we would a body, or prayerfully inter them in a columbarium for cremains.
