Dear Father,
What is the Church’s teaching on “green” burials? Like, can I have my body liquified?
-Paislee
Dear Paislee,
The Catholic Church is very “green.” Now that I have all my Irish readers’ attention, I mean, of course, that the Catholic Church holds dear to her heart the principle of environmental ecology. All that God has created is good: the planets and stars, our planet earth, and all the inhabitants of the earth, including everything from bacteria and mosquitoes to human beings.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that we “must … respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things which would be in contempt of the Creator and would bring disastrous consequences for human beings and their environment” (339).
The human body, whose principle of life is the human soul created by God, has a special dignity all its own. It is the human soul that causes us to treat a previously living human being with the utmost respect. Even non-Christian cultures treat deceased human bodies with a special respect, typically by burying them in distinct places with particular rites.
We Catholics understand that the deceased body may be used for scientific research. For example, we are not opposed to autopsies to determine the cause of death. One may want to donate one’s body to science for the training of doctors or to better understand how to eradicate diseases. In some cases, it is beneficial to donate organs from our deceased bodies, so long as death was not hastened or caused in order to harvest organs. We even acquiesce to cremation, “provided that it does not demonstrate a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body” (Catechism, 2301).
When it comes to being “green,” composting our leaves or our garbage is fine; human composting is not. Human composting and aquamation (liquefying) do not show proper respect to our bodies. The squeamish should avoid the next three paragraphs explaining the process. They are quotes from the U.S. Bishops’ March 2023 document “On the Proper Disposition of Bodily Remains.”
“In alkaline hydrolysis, the body is placed in a metal tank containing about 100 gallons of a chemical mixture of water and alkali and then subjected to both high temperature and high pressure in order to speed decomposition. In a matter of hours, the body is dissolved, except for some bone material. In human composting, the body is laid in a metal bin and surrounded by plant material (such as alfalfa, wood chips, straw, etc.) that fosters the growth of microbes and bacteria to break down the body. Heat and oxygen are added to accelerate the decomposition process. After about a month the body is entirely decomposed into soil.”
“After the alkaline hydrolysis process, there are…remnants of the bones that can be pulverized. … In addition, there are the 100 gallons of brown liquid into which the greater part of the body has been dissolved. This liquid is treated as wastewater and poured down the drain into the sewer system (in certain cases it is treated as fertilizer and spread over a field or forest). This procedure does not show adequate respect for the human body, nor express hope in the resurrection.”
“The end result of the human composting process is also disconcerting, for there is nothing left but compost, nothing that one can point to and identify as remains of the body. The body and the plant material have all decomposed together to yield a single mass of compost. What is left is approximately a cubic yard of compost that one is invited to spread on a lawn or in a garden or in some wilderness location. Like alkaline hydrolysis, human composting is not sufficiently respectful of the human body. In fact, the body is completely disintegrated. There is nothing distinguishably left of the body to be placed in a casket or an urn and laid to rest in a sacred place where Christian faithful can visit for prayer and remembrance.”
It is because of our belief in the sanctity of the human body and the resurrection of the body from the dead that we insist on Christian burial in the sacred and blessed ground of Catholic cemeteries. If a Catholic cemetery is unavailable, then at least the ground in which the body is buried should be blessed by a Catholic priest.
To treat the body as something to be discarded through composting or aquamation is contrary to the holiness of our bodies and the eventual reintegration of our bodies with our souls at the end of time in the resurrection of the dead. This holds true for those who wish to be cremated for anti-Catholic reasons, such as a denial of the resurrection of the body. We do not become angels when we die; our souls await the resurrection of our bodies. Only then can we enjoy all that heaven will offer.
The Church may be “green,” but she is not willing to place earthly ecology over and above the sacrality of our bodies, even when we are dead.
Go to the cemeteries and pray for those who have gone ahead of us.