The meaning of funerals. Console and approach, even without believing

I’ve been to three funerals last year, two in church and one not. And every time I wondered what is, for us, the function of the rite. In the days when a pope is buried according to the ceremonial envisaged for pontiffs, remodulating it just to distinguish it from that reserved for those in office – in Ratzinger’s cypress coffin, in addition to the remains, there are the coins minted during his reign, the pallium spun with the wool of two lambs from cloistered nuns and the tube with the deed that retraces his pontificate, but the final supplications will not be held – I wonder how much of the success of the Catholic religion, and of religions in general, is due to having built, over the centuries, scaffolding of clear and mysterious gestures at the same timeto be repeated identical forever in the face of life, but above all death.

The two funerals I attended in church in 2022 took place in winter, on two very cold days in January and December. The first was for a young woman, the second for an elderly man, and they moved me in a different way because tears are inversely proportional to the age of the dead. There is something that arouses and soothes pain, that makes one weep and consoles, regardless of whether one believes. The effect, I think, is heightened by the architecture and by the arrangement of the living and the dead, in a word by the scenography: the people are close, but far enough away to have to extend their hands to exchange the sign of peace, and the human nature, therefore mortal, of each one is drawn thanks to the space in which everyone, the priest, the dead and the living, are located by the rite, the height of the ceilings and the width of the naves. This is why coffins in church always seem short, like shoeboxes. It doesn’t sound blasphemous, but during religious funerals I always have the sensation of adhering to a format honed to perfection over the millennia, based on a perfect balance between duration and brevity, boredom and emotion, the fatigue of standing and the relief of being able to sit down.

The lay funeral I’ve been to in 2022 was the only beautiful lay funeral I’ve ever seen. It was a very hot July day in the entrance hall of a 1970s apartment building in Sesto San Giovanni, Milan. There were the dead man’s family, condominiums, janitors, friends and fellow taxi drivers, and the dead man in a closed coffin, between the concierge and the elevators he had passed all his life. The rite was simple, a kind of prayerless reduction of the Catholic one, but the place and simplicity guarded the bond of a community. Other secular funerals, on the other hand, have always been painful. In the “Sales del commiato” – which Italian law has obligated all municipalities to set up since 1990 – one never knows what to do: the places are aseptic, foreign and abstract, designed according to a Polish-Japanese aesthetic that confuses sadness and squalor. In addition, there are no rituals, gestures to perform, words to say or sing, necessary for pain to be transformed into ceremony. The Italian Federation of celebrants, founded in 2021 by Richard Brown and Clarissa Botsford, English residents in Italy, and chaired by Liana Moca, focuses instead on the personalization of the rite based on the personality of the deceased and the wishes of those who remain (and forms the celebrants on this). However, a ritual is based on repetition and cannot be reinvented every time. This is why I would like the celebrants to organize a conference with architects, playwrights, directors and set designers to construct buildings and funeral rites that are worthy, and shared as much as possible, even for non-believers.

One last thing: I was in St. Peter’s Square on the night of Karol Wojtyla’s death in April 2005. Thousands of faithful were present, taking pictures en masse against the background of the window where the Pope was dying or the dome. They didn’t want to witness the historical event they were witnessing, but the fact of being present and being able to witness it. It was the first time I measured the impact of mobile phones on public life and death, which is now customary. Here, it seems to me that these days we are taking a step further. Never, as for the funerals of Ratzinger and Pelé, it seems to me, have the corpses been photographed and exhibited, equating the funeral to gala events, up to the havoc of the selfie with the dead of the president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino. Another fundamental factor of funerals, at least in our culture, because the rite excites, consoles and brings people closer, would be to preserve the mystery of the end, hiding the body of the dead from the eyes of the living.