Safe at Home?

Eternal Image is the name of a company that produces caskets and urns for funerals. Here's their latest product line:

Dearly departed Diamondbacks fans will soon be able to have their cremated remains put into an urn that is “hand-designed using die-cast aluminum with proprietary clear coat finish” sitting atop a home plate-shaped base outlined in black.

A real baseball — provided with the urn or the fan’s prized autographed baseball — will rest on the top. The D-Backs logo will boldly accent the urn.

Or they can be buried in Major League Baseball-sanctioned caskets, with exterior woods like those of baseball bats, and a Diamondbacks logo on the inside lid and on the pillow. In the near future, fans of any of the 30 major league teams can go out of this world sporting team colors and logos. So far 12 team styles are available.

You can read the whole sad story here.

Well, the good news is that I get to comment on this before being faced with a family looking to bring home plate to church for a funeral. (Can you imagine what the pall bearers might want to wear?)

Full disclosure right up front: I'm not a sports fan. Oh, I'm happy when the Boston teams or my alma mater (Notre Dame) win but I don't lose a moment's sleep if they lose. So it's from that vantage point that I look askance at introducing such symbols into a Catholic Christian funeral rite, a rite that already devotes a fair amount of attention to the casket or urn.

While cremation is now allowed for Catholics, the Church still expresses a preference for interment of the intact body of the deceased. When cremation is the choice of an individual or an individual's family, the Church's ritual presumes that the cremains will be interred in a cemetery. At the funeral liturgy, a casket or urn is blessed with holy water recalling the baptism of the deceased in which the promise of eternal life was given. If a casket is used, it is then draped in a large white cloth symbolic of the white baptismal robe. A crucifix or a bible may be placed on the casket during the funeral liturgy and sometimes a crucifix is attached to the outside of the casket.

The focus is on the remains of the deceased whose body was a temple of the Holy Spirit, a body which, at on the Last Day, will be raised up and glorified and reunited with the soul which gave it life. If, as the scripture says, there is in the kingdom neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free - then I think it likely that there will be neither Red Sox nor Yankees. Nor should such emblems overshadow the symbols of Christian life.

It's one thing to be buried with an American flag lapel pin or even to place a cap with the familiar "B" in the casket. It's another thing altogether to "suit up" in your team's colors or to craft a miniature baseball diamond as your final resting place.

But wait! There's more -- more than team logos available to decorate the container for your mortal remains. It seems that Eternal Image is also playing with a really big league team: the Vatican. That's right, folks! Your casket or urn can be emblazoned with the Vatican seal and be accompanied by a gen-you-ine certificate of authenticity. To ease any qualms you may have about this, Eternal Image sends a portion of the profit to funding the Vatican Library. Read All About It - right here.

What do I think of Vatican embossed caskets and urns? While I find them significantly less offensive than the model pictured above, I would still question whether or not they would take the focus from the primary Christian symbols used in the funeral rite.

And yes, I also know that the Vatican now has a charter airline to fly you to pilgrimage destinations. With embarrassment, airline personnel had to demand that pilgrims returning from the shrine at Lourdes empty bottles of Lourdes water they were carrying on board because they violated the 3 ounce limit on such containers!