Letter from the Pastor
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January 29, 2023I was in 8th grade when I saw the science fiction movie, Soylent Green. The movie looked at our country in the then far off year 2022. The film depicted the United States and the world as being overpopulated, polluted, and global warming destroying the planet. So, an enterprising but evil company decided to make food out of the many dead bodies. The poor live in squalor, getting their water from communal spigots, and eat highly processed wafers: Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow, and the far more flavorful and nutritious: Soylent Green. At the end of the movie, the hero played by Charleston Heston figures it out but is wounded in a battle. He shouts out “Soylent Green is people!”
Many things that begin in science fiction become reality. New York Governor Hochul quietly signed into law on January 1st permission for “natural organic reduction,” better known as “human composting.” This is a growing passion among the enlightened elite. It is described as “an eco-friendly alternative to traditional burial or cremation which transforms the human body into nutrient rich soil.”
New York is the 6th state in legalizing this practice. Human composting consists of heating and regularly rotating a human corpse laid inside a container loaded with organic materials (alfalfa, straw and wood chips). After six to eight weeks, the entire body becomes soil. The bones are then placed in an incinerator burned into more soil, and added to what was once the rest of the body to be tossed into your garden, or forest, or farmland.
The arguments for human composting are “practical”, emotional and ideological. It costs less than a traditional burial yet more expensive than cremation. The composting cremation of the bones does far less damage to the environment, so they say. It satisfies an “emotional” connection to Mother Earth.
These ideas come from a philosophy that advances a radical separation between body and soul. In this view, the body is not essential, to human existence. The body can be treated as a mere thing or instrument. That way of treating the body leads one to think that natural processes can be altered, or the body’s healthy organs can be mutilated to conform to distorted and confused ideas. Or the body can be thrown away after death since its connection to the person had no real value in the first place.
Human composting erodes human dignity. The human body is not garbage or refuse, to be thrown in a compost pit. It is the essential mode of our existence – we are embodied souls. The soul has no life, self-understanding, or experiences apart from the body. A person is more than his body, but cannot live or be conceived of without his body. Our bodies are consecrated on the day of our baptism. God saw the human body as good, that He took on a human body at His Incarnation. Even outside of baptism, civilized people believe a person’s body has an inherent, intrinsic dignity that no one may violate with violence or assault. Human composting is a grave form of dehumanization.
The Vatican tried to educate the faithful in 2016, after years of abuse through cremation, noting, “The Church earnestly recommends that the pious custom (burial) be retained, but it does not forbid cremation, unless this is chosen for reasons, which are contrary to Christian teaching.” However, few realize Church teaching on the sanctity of the body or the rationale for the preference of burial. Even after cremation, the ashes must be buried; it can’t stay on the mantel piece or even worse, be divided and put into lockets or made into memory rocks.
We consider cemeteries holy grounds because they house something special, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, the body. We want the dead to rest in peace; when a cemetery is violated, we say, it has been “desecrated”.
We can never allow treating the human body as a refuse or turning it into compost
simply to help our gardens or forests or even Mother Earth.
Enjoy those vegetables; they may have been fertilized by someone you knew!?