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CREMATION OF THE BODY? IT CAN BE AN EXCELLENT CATHOLIC CHOICE

If there are theologians ready to believe and teach that bodies will emerge from the tombs to resume their physical appearance, confusing the mystery of faith in the resurrection with the long production of horror films about zombies, then they might as well resign themselves: that description, complete with bodies recomposed in flesh and blood, they will find it much better illustrated in the Qur'anic Paradise, also including seventy virgins, so as not to miss anything material, both in libations and more.

- Church news -

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The Catholic Church allows cremation from 1963, since the Holy Office, with education Pious and constant the 5 July of that year, established that it is not "in itself contrary to the Christian religion" and that the faithful who chose it would no longer be denied the sacraments and funeral services, provided that this choice was not motivated «as a denial of Christian dogmas, or with a sectarian soul, or out of hatred against the Catholic religion and the Church".

Since then the discipline has passed into the Code of Canon Law the 1983 (can. 1176 §3) and in that of the Eastern Churches of 1990. It is a distinction that must be held firm from the beginning: one thing is the lawfulness of the practice, another is the preference for burial. The Church, however, absolutely prohibits the scattering of ashes and their conservation at home, as we'll see.

A historical aside: It is worth remembering that cremation had been condemned by the Church with a decree of the Holy Office of 12 May 1886, in the years in which its practice had been assumed by Freemasonry as an ideological flag with an anti-clerical function, to publicly deny the truths of faith about eternal life and, above all, on the resurrection of the dead.

Theology has nothing to fear from cremation itself. Fire does not touch the soul and in no way limits divine omnipotence in resurrecting bodies: God who took man from the dust can call him back from the ashes as well as from the earth. Or maybe it's not pronounced, precisely in the Ashes liturgy with which Lent begins: «dust you are and to dust you will return» (Gen 3,19)? Cremation may be chosen for hygienic reasons, economic, ecological or even ethical, and it is a completely legitimate choice for a faithful Catholic.

We cannot forget the lack of space in the cemeteries of large cities. Furthermore, it should be considered that, unlike nations inhabited by a few tens of millions of people spread over boundless territories, There are others in the world where the population density is very high: in those cases, cremation, more than desirable it should be recommended. We then fly over the ecomonsters of various cemeteries in which, due to lack of space on the land, height was aimed at by building horrible five-storey buildings to contain the burial niches inside. In most Italian cemeteries there are no longer places for burials on the ground, where it would be natural to place the body through the ancient gesture of returning it to the earth itself. We don't have the spaces that other populations have, for example in the United States of America, in Australia and other places where cemeteries are large green parks, the so-called Rural Cemetery Movement (cemetery garden), called more commonly today Lawn Cemetery O Memorial Park (memorial park).

These places extend over large green meadows with trees, they don't even look like burial places, at least for us Italians and Europeans of Latin origin, accustomed to tombs that vary from ancient monumental funerary chapels of valuable artistic interest to niches and tombs of rare bad taste. In the “garden cemeteries”, to maintain the appearance of a uniform lawn, gravestones are often flat and placed at ground level. There are no walls, individual fences or monumental family tombs that interrupt the view: trees, paths and ponds integrate the cemetery into the natural landscape, transforming it into a place of peace for visitors too, where it is possible to take children or animals for a walk to play. But as we were saying, ground burials have now disappeared from most cemeteries and our population density does not allow us places like Lawn Cemetery O Memorial Park. In certain cases, cremation or burial on the fifth floor of a cemetery condominium is better? Thank God free choice is allowed, also from Holy Mother Church.

It is therefore no coincidence that the recent Magisterium felt the need to intervene precisely in this area, to pastorally accompany increasingly widespread choices without leaving them without a meaningful framework. Taking into account these new needs and related problems, education To rise with Christ issued on 15 August 2016 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has updated Pious and constant specifying the rules on the conservation of ashes. The document is clear: the ashes must receive the same care and respect reserved for the body, and must be kept in a sacred place: the cemetery, or a church, or an area dedicated to this by the competent ecclesiastical authority (n. 5). The opposition of the Church, so, it is not towards cremation in and of itself, if anything towards what one might want to manifest or openly deny with it.

Christian tradition has always favored inhumation for three reasons that To rise with Christ summarizes precisely. First of all because it recalls the body of Christ placed in the tomb and expresses with greater symbolic force the expectation of the resurrection of the body (cf.. n. 3). Then because the human body, through Baptism, it has become a temple of the Holy Spirit and theology urges us to treat it with the greatest physical proximity possible, also in the gesture of entrusting it to the earth. Finally, because burial preserves the communion between the living and the dead, encouraging remembrance and prayer. It is for this reason - not out of suspicion towards fire itself - that the Church prohibits the scattering of ashes in nature, their conversion into jewelry and commemorative objects and their preservation at home, this is in order to avoid pantheistic drifts, naturalist or nichilist, in addition to the commodification of the memory of the deceased (cf.. n. 7). Only in serious and exceptional circumstances, linked to local cultural conditions, the Ordinary can grant domestic conservation, never divided, But, between different families (cf.. n. 6).

A brief historical overview helps put things in perspective. In archaic Rome, inhumation prevailed. From the late Republic cremation took over: fu Silla, In the 79 a.C., the first member of the gens Cornelia — traditionally faithful to earth burial — to be cremated, perhaps for fear that his corpse would be outraged by his enemies. From there cremation remained the dominant rite throughout the late Republic and the first and second centuries of the Empire: the body was burned on a pyre together with personal objects and offerings and the remains collected in a cinerary urn kept in tombs or columbaria, like the one still visible of Pomponius Hylas on the Appian Way.

It was with Hadrian (117-138 d.C.) that burial gradually came back into fashion — the emperor himself was perhaps the first to be buried rather than cremated — with the construction of sculpted sarcophagi becoming increasingly widespread in the 2nd century and generalized in the 3rd, even in the provinces. Multiple factors - changes in taste - played a role in this turning point, in urbanization and above all in ideas about the afterlife - but the growing spread of Christianity undoubtedly also contributed, who considered cremation disrespectful to a body destined for resurrection.

The profound reasons for this trend reversal However, they remain debated among historians. Already in the 1930s Arthur Darby Nock¹ he observed how the transition to inhumation followed, at least initially, a social fashion that spread from top to bottom rather than a precise doctrinal rethinking on the afterlife; a reading taken up and expanded by Jocelyn M. (C). Toynbee². The fact remains, however you explain it, that precisely in those decades Christians dug the first Roman catacombs, reserving burial for their dead from the beginning, due to a conscious and deliberate distance from the then still dominant use of cremation in Roman society.

This is where it is worth stopping on a broader point, which applies to this as well as other cases: since the early Christian era, attempts were made to draw clear distinctions with respect to what were considered pagan customs. but yet, in other circumstances, numerous elements and symbols of paganites Roman were taken, emptied of their original meaning and filled with Christian symbolism, this much in the liturgical context - think of the adoption of the stole as the symbol par excellence of the ministerial priesthood, or other elements that have become liturgical wallpapers -, to follow in the administrative field with the adoption of terms and organizational structures such as curiae and dioceses, borrowed largely from Roman law. The history of the Church has never been a wholesale rejection of the world around it, but an exercise in common sense in which he evaluated himself, case by case, what needed to be rejected and what could be purified and assumed.

Some theologians who demonize cremation by connecting it directly to the mystery of the resurrection of the dead they take a serious risk, due to excess of zeal, of slipping into a form of inverted paganism: a completely involuntary esotericism. The bodies that emerge from the tombs summarizing their appearance are catechetical images, created for the simple and for those who couldn't even read, let's think of the cycles of frescoes that are still found today in many monumental churches and cathedrals. They are pedagogical images, not theological descriptions of how. Linking the opposition to cremation to such a literal reading of the resurrection of the body denotes — something serious, if theologians do it - an improper understanding of the mystery.

Saint Paul had already clarified this with admirable precision in the Letter to the Philippians:

«​in fact our citizenship is in heaven and from there we await the Lord Jesus Christ as savior, who will transfigure our miserable body to conform it to his glorious body, by virtue of the power he has to subject all things to himself" (Fil 3,20-21).

It is from this Pauline theology which derives from one of the most beautiful formulas of the liturgy of the dead: in the Eucharistic Prayer III, remembering the deceased brother or sister, the Church prays that God, when "he will raise the dead from the earth", «he will transform our mortal body into the image of his glorious body» (Roman Missal, Eucharistic prayer III, quoting Fil 3,20-21).

The heart of the doctrine it lies precisely in these two words: transformation e conformation. And here it must be clarified that it is not a question of the mechanical recomposition of the dispersed physical particles of a corpse, almost as if the power of God depended on the conservation of the original matter: would be, that yes, a magical thought. Rather, it is about the continuity of the person, including identity and history, brought by God to a new condition understood as "conforming" - σύμμορφος (symmorphos), the same word used by the Apostle Paul in Romans 8,29 about the predestination of believers — to the glorious body of the risen Christ. It is the same paschal mystery of death, burial and resurrection which acts in the believer through Baptism and finds fulfillment on the last day, whatever the physical fate of his mortal remains. Or perhaps we want to fear that God may have difficulty restoring a body to the souls of the deceased on the day of the resurrection of the dead?

If not, if there are theologians ready to believe and teach that bodies will emerge from the tombs to resume their physical appearance, confusing the mystery of faith in the resurrection with the long production of horror films about zombies, then they might as well resign themselves: that description, complete with bodies recomposed in flesh and blood, they will find it much better illustrated in the Qur'anic Paradise, also including seventy virgins, so as not to miss anything material, both in libations and more.

From the island of Patmos, 22 August 2026

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NOTE

¹ A.D. Nock, Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire, «Harvard Theological Review» 25, 1932, pp. 32-59.

² J.M.C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1996.

 

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CREMATION OF THE BODY? IT CAN BE AN EXCELLENT CATHOLIC CHOICE

Should there be theologians ready to believe and to teach that bodies will come out of their tombs to resume their physical likeness, confusing the mystery of faith concerning the resurrection with the long line of zombie horror films, then they might as well resign themselves: that description, complete with bodies reassembled in flesh and bone, they will find far better illustrated in the Qur’anic Paradise, seventy virgins included, so as not to lack for anything material, in feasting and more besides.

— Current Ecclesial Affairs —

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The Catholic Church has permitted cremation since 1963, when the Holy Office, with the instruction Pious and constant of 5 July of that year, established that cremation is not “in itself contrary to the Christian religion” and that the faithful who chose it should no longer be denied the sacraments and funeral rites, provided that the choice was not motivated “as a denial of Christian dogmas, or out of a sectarian spirit, or out of hatred for the Catholic religion and the Church.”

Since then the discipline has passed into the 1983 Code of Canon Law (can. 1176 §3) and into that of the Eastern Churches of 1990. This is a distinction that must be firmly maintained from the outset: one thing is the licitness of the practice, another is the preference for burial. The Church, however, absolutely forbids the scattering of ashes and their preservation at home, as we shall see.

A historical aside: it is worth recalling that cremation had been condemned by the Church by decree of the Holy Office of 12 May 1886, in the years when the practice had been taken up by Freemasonry as an ideological banner in an anticlerical key, in order to publicly deny the truths of faith concerning eternal life and, above all, the resurrection of the dead.

Theology has nothing to fear from cremation in itself. Fire does not touch the soul, nor does it in any way limit divine omnipotence in raising bodies: the God who drew man from dust can call him back from ashes just as well as from earth. Or does Scripture not say, precisely in the liturgy of Ashes with which Lent begins: “for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19)? Cremation may be chosen for hygienic, economic, ecological, or even ethical reasons, and it is an entirely legitimate choice for a Catholic faithful. Nor can we forget the shortage of space in the cemeteries of large cities. It should also be considered that, unlike nations inhabited by a few tens of millions of people spread across vast territories, there are other places in the world where population density is instead very high: in those cases, cremation, far from being merely advisable, should actually be recommended. Let us pass over the architectural monstrosities of various cemeteries where, for lack of space on the ground, height has been exploited, building hideous five-storey blocks to house the niches inside them.

In most Italian cemeteries there are no longer any burial plots in the ground, where it would be natural to lay the body through the ancient gesture of restoring it to the earth itself. We do not have the space available to other peoples — for example in the United States, in Australia, and other places where cemeteries are vast green parks, the so-called Rural Cemetery Movement (garden cemetery), now more commonly called the Lawn Cemetery or Memorial Park. These places, spread over broad tree-lined lawns, hardly even look like burial grounds, at least to us Italians and Latin Europeans, accustomed to tombs ranging from ancient funerary chapels of considerable artistic value to niches and tombs of rare bad taste. In these “garden cemeteries,” to maintain the appearance of a uniform lawn, headstones are often flat and set at ground level. There are no low walls, individual enclosures, or monumental family tombs to interrupt the view: trees, paths, and small lakes integrate the cemetery into the natural landscape, turning it into a place of peace even for visitors, where it is possible to bring children to play or walk pets. As we were saying, however, ground burial has by now disappeared from most cemeteries, and our population density does not allow for places like the Lawn Cemetery or Memorial Park. In certain cases, is it better to be cremated, or entombed on the fifth floor of a cemetery apartment block? Thank God, free choice is granted, even by Holy Mother Church.

It is therefore no coincidence that the recent Magisterium has felt the need to intervene precisely on this terrain, in order to pastorally accompany increasingly widespread choices without leaving them devoid of a framework of meaning. Taking account of these new needs and their related problems, the instruction To rise with Christ, issued on 15 August 2016 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, updated Pious and constant by specifying the norms for the preservation of ashes. The document is unambiguous: ashes must receive the same care and respect given to the body, and must be kept in a sacred place: the cemetery, or a church, or an area dedicated to this purpose by the competent ecclesiastical authority (n. 5). The Church’s opposition, then, is not to cremation in and of itself, but rather to what one might wish to express or openly deny through it.

Christian tradition has always favored burial for three reasons that To rise with Christ summarizes with precision. First, because it recalls the body of Christ laid in the tomb, and expresses with greater symbolic force the expectation of the resurrection of the flesh (cf. n. 3). Second, because the human body, through Baptism, has become a temple of the Holy Spirit, and theology urges that it be treated with the greatest possible physical closeness, even in the gesture of entrusting it to the earth. Finally, because burial safeguards communion between the living and the dead, fostering remembrance and prayer. It is for this reason — not out of any suspicion toward fire in itself — that the Church forbids the scattering of ashes in nature, their conversion into jewelry or commemorative objects, and their preservation at home, in order to avoid pantheistic, naturalistic, or nihilistic drifts, as well as the commodification of the memory of the deceased (cf. n. 7). Only in serious and exceptional circumstances, tied to local cultural conditions, may the Ordinary grant domestic preservation, though never divided, however, among different family units (cf. n. 6).

A brief historical excursus helps put things in perspective. In archaic Rome, burial prevailed. From the late Republic onward, cremation gained the upper hand: it was Sulla, in 79 BC, the first member of the gens Cornelia — traditionally faithful to burial in the earth — to be cremated, perhaps for fear that his corpse would be desecrated by his enemies. From then on cremation remained the dominant rite throughout the late Republic and the first two centuries of the Empire: the body was burned on a pyre together with personal belongings and offerings, and the remains gathered in a cinerary urn kept in tombs or columbaria, such as the one still visible belonging to Pomponius Hylas on the Appian Way.

It was under Hadrian (117–138 AD) that burial gradually came back into fashion — the emperor himself was perhaps the first to be buried rather than cremated — with the construction of carved sarcophagi becoming increasingly widespread in the second century and generalized in the third, even in the provinces. Several factors weighed on this shift — changes in taste, in urbanization, and above all in ideas about the afterlife — but the growing spread of Christianity, which considered cremation disrespectful toward a body destined for resurrection, undoubtedly contributed to it as well.

The deeper reasons for this reversal of trend remain, moreover, debated among historians. Already in the 1930s, Arthur Darby Nock¹ observed how the shift to burial followed, at least initially, a social fashion that spread from the top down rather than a precise doctrinal rethinking of the afterlife; a reading later taken up and expanded by Jocelyn M. (C). Toynbee². What remains true, however one explains it, is that in precisely those decades Christians were digging the first Roman catacombs, reserving burial for their own dead from the very outset, in conscious and deliberate distance from the then still dominant use of cremation in Roman society.

This is where it is worth pausing on a broader point, one that holds true here as in other cases: from the earliest Christian era, an effort was made to draw clear distinctions from what were considered pagan customs. And yet, on other occasions, numerous elements and symbols of Roman paganites were taken up, emptied of their original meaning, and filled with Christian symbolism — this occurred both in the liturgical sphere, as with the adoption of the stole as the preeminent symbol of ministerial priesthood, or other elements that became liturgical vestments, and in the administrative sphere, with the adoption of terms and organizational structures such as curiae and dioceses, largely borrowed from Roman law. The history of the Church has never been a wholesale rejection of the world that surrounded it, but an exercise of good sense in which, case by case, what had to be rejected and what could be purified and assumed was weighed.

Some theologians who demonize cremation by directly linking it to the mystery of the resurrection of the dead risk seriously, out of excessive zeal, sliding into a form of inverted paganism: an entirely involuntary esotericism. Bodies emerging from tombs and resuming their former appearance are catechetical images, created for the simple and for those who could not even read — one need only think of the cycles of frescoes still found today in many monumental churches and cathedrals. These are pedagogical images, not theological descriptions of the how. Linking opposition to cremation to so literal a reading of the resurrection of the body betrays — a serious matter, when it is theologians who do so — an improper understanding of the mystery.

Saint Paul had already clarified this with admirable precision in the Letter to the Philippians:

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself” (Phil 3:20-21).

It is from this Pauline theology that one of the most beautiful formulas of the liturgy for the dead descends: in Eucharistic Prayer III, making memory of a departed brother or sister, the Church prays that God, “when from the earth he will raise up in the flesh those who have died,” will “transform our lowly body after the pattern of his own glorious body” (Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer III, citing Phil 3:20-21).

The heart of the doctrine lies precisely in these two words: transformation and conformation. And here it must be clarified that this is not a matter of the mechanical reassembly of the scattered physical particles of a corpse, as though the power of God depended on the preservation of the original matter: that, indeed, would be magical thinking. It is rather a matter of the continuity of the person — identity and history included — brought by God to a new condition understood as “conformed” — σύμμορφος (symmorphos), the very word used by the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:29 regarding the predestination of believers — to the glorious body of the risen Christ. It is the same paschal mystery of death, burial, and resurrection that works in the believer through Baptism and finds fulfillment on the last day, whatever the physical fate of his mortal remains may have been. Or shall we perhaps fear that God might have difficulty in restoring a body to the souls of the departed on the day of the resurrection of the dead?

If not, should there be theologians ready to believe and to teach that bodies will come out of their tombs to resume their physical likeness, confusing the mystery of faith concerning the resurrection with the long line of zombie horror films, then they might as well resign themselves: that description, complete with bodies reassembled in flesh and bone, they will find far better illustrated in the Qur’anic Paradise, seventy virgins included, so as not to lack for anything material, in feasting and more besides.

From The Island of Patmos, 22 August 2026

NOTES

¹ A.D. Nock, Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire, “Harvard Theological Review” 25, 1932, pp. 32-59.

² J.M.C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1996.

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DOES THE CREMATION OF THE BODY? IT CAN BE AN EXCELLENT CATHOLIC OPTION

if there are theologians willing to believe and teach that bodies will come out of the tombs to regain their physical appearance, confusing the mystery of faith about the resurrection with the long production of horror films about zombies, then they better resign themselves: that description, with bodies recomposed into flesh and blood included, You will find it much better illustrated in the Koranic Paradise, seventy virgins included, so that they do not lack anything material, both at banquets and elsewhere.

- Ecclesial news -

.

The Catholic Church allows cremation from 1963, when the Holy Office, with the instruction Pious and constant the 5 July of that year, established that cremation is not "in itself contrary to the Christian religion" and that the faithful who had chosen it would no longer be denied sacraments and funerals., provided that such a choice was not motivated "as a denial of Christian dogmas.", or with sectarian spirit, or out of hatred against the Catholic religion and the Church".

Since then the discipline has passed to the Code of Canon Law of 1983 (can. 1176 §3) and that of the Eastern Churches of 1990. It is a distinction that must be held firm from the beginning: one thing is the legality of the practice, another is the preference for burial. However, the Church absolutely prohibits the scattering of ashes and their preservation at home., as we will see.

A historical incident: It is worth remembering that cremation had been condemned by the Church by decree of the Holy Office of the 12 May 1886, in the years in which its practice had been assumed by Freemasonry as an ideological flag of an anti-clerical nature., to publicly deny the truths of faith about eternal life and, above all, about the resurrection of the dead.

Theology has nothing to fear from cremation itself. Fire does not touch the soul and does not in any way limit divine omnipotence to resurrect bodies.: God, that brought man out of the dust, can call him back from the ashes just as from the earth. Chance does not proclaim itself, precisely in the liturgy of Ashes with which Lent begins: "You are dust and to dust you will return" (GN 3,19)? Cremation may be chosen for hygienic reasons, economic, ecological or also ethical, and it is a completely legitimate choice for a faithful Catholic. Nor can we forget the scarcity of spaces in cemeteries in big cities.. Besides, it must be considered that, unlike Nations inhabited by a few tens of millions of people distributed over immense territories, There are others in the world where the population density is very high.: in those cases, cremation, more than advisable, should be strongly recommended. Let us ignore the eyesores of several cemeteries in which, due to lack of space on the land, has opted for height, building horrible five-story buildings to contain the niches inside.

In most Italian cemeteries there are no longer burial places on land, where it would be natural to deposit the body through the ancient gesture of its restitution to the earth itself. We do not have the spaces that other populations have, for example in the United States, in Australia and other places where cemeteries are large green parks — the so-called Rural Cemetery Movement (garden cemetery), called today more commonly Lawn Cemetery O Memorial Park (memorial park). These places, spread out over wide green wooded meadows, They don't even look like burial places, at least for us, Italians and Europeans with Latin roots, accustomed to tombs that vary from ancient monumental funerary chapels of notable artistic interest to niches and tombs of truly rare bad taste. In the "garden cemeteries", to maintain the appearance of a uniform meadow, Gravestones are usually flat and placed at ground level.. There are no walls, individual fences or monumental family tombs that interrupt the view: trees, Trails and small lakes integrate the cemetery into the natural landscape, transforming it into a place of peace also for visitors, where it is possible to take the children to play or walk the animals. As we said, however, In most of the cemeteries the earthen graves have already disappeared and our population density does not allow us places like the Lawn Cemetery O Memorial Park. In certain cases, Is cremation or burial on the fifth floor of a cemetery building better?? Thank God free choice is granted, also from the Holy Mother Church.

It's not, well, coincidence that the recent Magisterium felt the need to intervene precisely in this area, to pastorally accompany increasingly widespread decisions without leaving them deprived of a framework of meaning. Taking into account these new needs and the related problems, the instruction To rise with Christ, promulgated on 15 of August of 2016 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, updated Pious and constant specifying the rules on the conservation of ashes. The document is clear: the ashes must receive the same care and respect reserved for the body, and must be kept in a sacred place: the cemetery, or a church, or an area dedicated to it by the competent ecclesiastical authority (n. 5). The setback of the Church, therefore, It is not towards cremation in and of itself, but rather towards what one might want to openly manifest or deny with it..

Christian tradition has always preferred burial for three reasons that To rise with Christ accurately summarize. Above all because it remembers the body of Christ deposited in the tomb and expresses with greater symbolic force the expectation of the resurrection of the body. (cf.. n. 3). Then because the human body, through Baptism, It has become a temple of the Holy Spirit, and theology encourages treating it as physically close as possible., also in the gesture of entrusting it to the earth. Finally, because the grave guards the communion between the living and the dead, promoting remembrance and prayer. It is for this reason — not because of a suspicion of the fire itself — that the Church prohibits the scattering of ashes in nature., their conversion into jewelry and commemorative objects and their conservation at home, this in order to avoid pantheistic drifts, naturalists or nihilists, in addition to the commodification of the memory of the deceased (cf.. n. 7). Only in serious and exceptional circumstances, linked to local cultural conditions, the Ordinary can grant domestic conservation, never divided, however, between different family units (cf.. n. 6).

A brief historical excursion helps put things in perspective. In archaic Rome burial prevailed. Since the late Republic, cremation took the lead: it was Sulla, in the year 79 a.C., the first member of the gens Cornelia — traditionally faithful to ground burial — in having one cremated, perhaps for fear that his corpse would be violated by his enemies. Since then, cremation continued to be the dominant rite throughout the late Republic and during the first and second centuries of the Empire.: The body was burned on a pyre along with personal objects and offerings., and the remains were collected in a cinerary urn guarded in tombs or columbariums., like the one still visible of Pomponius Hylas on the Appian Way.

It was with Hadrian (117-138 d.C.) when inhumation gradually came back into fashion – the emperor himself was perhaps the first to have himself buried rather than cremated – with the construction of sculpted sarcophagi becoming more widespread in the 2nd century and widespread in the 3rd, even in the provinces. Several factors weighed in this shift — changes in taste, in urbanization and especially in ideas about the afterlife — but the growing spread of Christianity undoubtedly also contributed., who considered cremation disrespectful toward a body destined for resurrection.

The deep reasons for this trend reversal they continue, otherwise, debated among historians. Already in the thirties of the 20th century, Arthur Darby Nock¹ I observed how the passage to the burial continued, at least initially, a social fashion spread from the top down rather than a precise doctrinal rethinking of the afterlife; a reading taken up and expanded by Jocelyn M. (C). Toynbee². The fact remains, explains itself as it explains itself, that precisely in those decades Christians excavated the first Roman catacombs, reserving burial for their own dead from the beginning, by conscious and deliberate distance from the then still dominant use of cremation in Roman society.

Here it is worth stopping at a broader point, What is valid for this case as for others?: Since the first Christian era, attempts have been made to draw clear distinctions regarding what were considered pagan customs.. And yet, on other occasions, numerous elements and symbols of the paganites Roman were taken, emptied of their original meaning and filled with Christian symbology, this both in the liturgical sphere - think of the adoption of the stole as a symbol par excellence of the ministerial priesthood, or other elements converted into liturgical ornaments —, as in the administrative field, with the adoption of terms and organizational structures such as curias and dioceses, taken largely from Roman law. The history of the Church has never been a wholesale rejection of the world around it., but an exercise of common sense in which it was valued, case by case, what had to be rejected and what could be purified and assumed.

Some theologians who demonize cremation relating it directly to the mystery of the resurrection of the dead they run the serious risk, due to excess zeal, of slipping into a form of inverted paganism: a completely involuntary esotericism. The bodies that emerge from the tombs recovering their appearance are catechetical images, created for the simple and for those who did not even know how to read; Let us think about the cycles of frescoes that are still found today in so many monumental churches and cathedrals.. They are pedagogical images, not theological descriptions of how. Linking opposition to cremation to such a literal reading of the resurrection of bodies denotes something serious., if theologians do it - an improper understanding of the mystery.

Saint Paul had already clarified it with admirable precision in the Letter to the Philippians:

"US, instead, we are citizens of heaven, from where we wait for a Savior: the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform our humble body, according to the model of his glorious body, with that energy he has to submit everything" (Flp 3,20-21).

It is from this Pauline theology from where one of the most beautiful formulas of the liturgy of the dead descends: in the Eucharistic Prayer III, remembering a deceased brother or sister, The Church prays that God, when he "brings forth the dead from the earth", "transform our fragile body into a glorious body like yours" (Model Romano, Eucharistic Prayer III, quoting Flp 3,20-21).

The heart of the doctrine It is precisely in these two words: transformation and conformation. And here it must be clarified that it is not about the mechanical recomposition of the dispersed physical particles of a corpse., as if the power of God depended on the conservation of the original matter: that would be magical thinking. It is more about the continuity of the person, identity and history included, brought by God to a new condition understood as “conforming” — σύμμορφος (symmorphos), the same word used by the Apostle Paul in Romans 8,29 regarding the predestination of believers — to the glorious body of the resurrected Christ. It is the same paschal mystery of death, burial and resurrection that acts in the believer through Baptism and finds its fulfillment on the last day, whatever the physical fate of his mortal remains may have been. Or are we to fear that God may have difficulty in restoring a body to the souls of the deceased on the day of the resurrection of the dead??

Otherwise, if there are theologians willing to believe and teach that bodies will come out of the tombs to regain their physical appearance, confusing the mystery of faith about the resurrection with the long production of horror films about zombies, then they better resign themselves: that description, with bodies recomposed into flesh and blood included, You will find it much better illustrated in the Koranic Paradise, seventy virgins included, so that they do not lack anything material, both at banquets and elsewhere.

Desde The Island of Patmos, 22 of August of 2026

NOTES

¹ A.D. Nock, Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire, «Harvard Theological Review» 25, 1932, pp. 32-59.

² J.M.C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1996.

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