![]() Instead of visiting the dying, comforting them, and praying with them, they are commonly sedated: I understand from priests involved in hospital-visiting that it is now rare to be able to give the last rites to a conscious patient. It is no coincidence that an era that ignores or mocks the idea of spiritual preparation for death, marking death, and mourning it is an era in which death is difficult to discuss. Even if we think pre-conciliar preaching was too gloomy (an academic question for me and most readers, too young to have experienced it), it has become evident that always looking on the bright side does not in itself ward off all our problems-and certainly not the problem of death. ![]() The Council did not, in fact, tell priests not to preach about mindfulness of death. The discontinuity in the preaching is one problem-Pepino notes “changes in official teaching” that turned “humble folk into skeptics”-but there is also the question of the intrinsic value of the new approach. gave the impression that the clergy had either ceased to believe in them or no longer knew how to discuss them, even though these had been frequent sermon topics right up until the Council. The sudden silence in the pulpits (as tracked in parish bulletins giving the topic of the homily) regarding the four last things. In a recent book review of How Our World Stopped Being Christian, by the French sociologist Guillaume Cuchet, John Pepino writes: This preaching stopped abruptly in modern times. The Four Last Things-death, judgement, hell, and heaven-used to be a regular subject for preaching and pious meditation. 15:16)-the only quotation from Scripture found, interestingly enough, in the Harry Potter books. It is, indeed, our enemy: “The last enemy to be overcome is death” (1 Cor. Death is important-worthy of respect, indeed-but it is not a holy thing. ![]() ![]() These even found their way onto liturgical vestments, until the Church forbade this, since only images and symbols of holy things should decorate vestments. Memento mori images are found not only on tombs and gravestones, but also in association with the memorial plaques found in Catholic (and Episcopalian) churches: a human skull or skeleton, mournful angels with inverted torches, hourglasses, and the like. ![]()
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