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.The Holy Office of theRoman Catholic Church took cremation seriously enough to issue threeseparate decrees against it in the 1880s and 1890s.In accordance withthese mandates, Archbishop Ryan of Pennsylvania refused to allow fu-nerals to be held in his cathedral over the bodies of parishioners slatedfor cremation.By portraying cremationists as sacrilegious secularists inleague with “heathenism,” and by insisting that cremation threatenedto undermine long-standing Christian beliefs and practices (most nota-bly the resurrection of the body), Catholics and other Christian tradi-tionalists (many of them immigrants) served as the leading stumblingblock to cremation’s acceptance.13What motivated individual Catholics, undertakers, and women tooppose cremation is difficult to determine.What is clear is that the cre-mation movement threatened to undercut the social power and culturalauthority of all three groups.Before the rise of cremation and the fu-neral industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, death riteshad been the domain of women and the church.Women prepared thebody for burial, while ministers and priests officiated at last rites.In theend, the corpse was entrusted to the church, often in a churchyard plot(which women were typically charged with tending).Cremation threat-ened to upset both this American way of death and the emerging para-digm of the embalming undertaker.Early cremationists thought little ofeither the corpse or bodily preparations and they disdained much of theVictorian funeral as overly ritualized mumbo-jumbo.Funeral rites wereimportant, cremation reformers believed, but they should be kept sim-ple and they could be performed by lay people just as efficaciously as byclerics.Undertakers, by abrogating to themselves many of the duties as-sociated with the corpse and its disposition, were also poised to under-mine the authority of the women and church.But those undertakerswere threatened, in turn, by the cremationists, who by resisting em-balming and burial challenged not only their aspirations to professionalstatus but also their livelihood itself.About this power struggle, Catho-lic critics were the most explicit.Some of them worried that state legis-latures would pass laws mandating cremation and then enforce that fiaton unwilling Catholics.Others, noting how the municipal cemetery hadThe Memorial Idea135grown at the expense of the churchyard, insisted that authority overboth corpse and cemetery rested by natural and divine law with theMother Church, not with an overbearing state.“It is eminently rightand proper,” one wrote, “that the mother should have full control ofthe dormitory where her children sleep.”14African Americans and the PoorWhile undertakers, women, and traditional Christians opposed crema-tion, Blacks and poor whites (many of them immigrants) ignored it.During the nineteenth century cremationists argued repeatedly that cre-mation represented a boon to the impoverished—that the burying re-gime hurt the poor far more than the rich because funeral expenses werefor them more of a burden.The cemetery, moreover, was said to dis-criminate scandalously between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Onesupporter estimated that the average cost for cremation was one-quarter that for burial.Dr.LeMoyne argued that the widespread adop-tion of cremation would save billions of dollars.He pointed out thatburial practices drew a great divide between the wealthy, who could af-ford extravagances, and the destitute, who could not: “Thus the customof inhumation separates the rich and the poor in their final homes as ef-fectually as false religious customs separate the pariah from the highercastes in India.” Cremation, of course, would obviate this difficulty,since one of its aims was “to bring rich and poor to a level in their lasthomes, that the common brotherhood of man may be practically dem-onstrated.” “Cremation treats the body of a prince as it does that of thepeasant; the body of the king as that of the commoner; the patrician asthe plebeian; the President of the United States as the obscurest citi-zen.”15Other believers in the brotherhood of humanity cited similar socialbenefits.At the first cremation in New York State a friend of the de-ceased applauded the fact that the funeral occurred at a crematory,where “all are alike,” instead of a cemetery, “where distinction is madebetween rich and poor with costly monuments and little woodencrosses.” Others said cremation would make it more economical forpeople of all social ranks to ship home the remains of loved ones whodied away from home.Dean George Hodges of the Episcopal DivinitySchool translated this socio-economic argument into an ethical impera-tive.“It is immoral,” Hodges stated flatly, “so to spend money whichmight buy bread for the people [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]