The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) issued several documents late in 2023. The faithful had hardly digested one before the next was presented. One in particular generated a minor controversy before it was swallowed up by the larger controversy of a later document. It might be useful to go back and spend a moment thinking through a question that arose: did the Vatican really say that our bodies won’t rise from the dead?
Well, yes, and no.
First, let’s recall the context of the question. In December of last year, the DDF published a reply given to a question posed by Matteo Cardinal Zuppi, the archbishop of Bologna in Italy, “Regarding Two Questions About the Preservation of the Ashes of the Deceased Following Cremation”. First, the cardinal asked if it could be permitted for a permanent repository to store the cremated remains of multiple people, commingled, provided that it is clearly labeled with the “basic details” of the lives of the deceased so that their memories could be preserved, in the same way that ossuaries (common repositories for bones) function. Second, he asked if families might keep a portion of a person’s cremated remains in a place “significant for the history of the deceased.”
In responding to these questions, Manuel Cardinal Fernandez wrote that while our bodies will indeed rise in a transformed state, “the body of the resurrected person will not necessarily consist of the same elements that it had before it died.” This line in particular caught the attention of many, prompting questions: is the Cardinal saying my body won’t be raised from the dead? That some other thing will be put together? If God can rebuild me a new body out of anything, is it really my body? And why be so concerned about keeping our remains as intact as possible (e.g. not allowing the scattering of ashes) if my body won’t be put back together, anyway?
To understand Cardinal Fernandez’s response, and the Church’s teaching on this matter, we need to understand the relationship between our body and soul, or rather, the relationship between the material and spiritual aspects of ourselves.
A human being is a composite of body and soul. Human beings are ensouled bodies, or embodied souls. But there is a certain relationship between the two constituents. The soul is the form of the body. This does not mean that the soul is like a cookie cutter that gives the body its shape. It means that the soul is what constitutes, organizes, and composes certain materials as a human body. The reason we can know this is that after death, after the soul has separated from the body, the body decomposes—that is, it de-composes, breaks down into its constituent parts, and no longer is constituted as a human body.
We treat dead bodies, or rather, the bodies of the dead, with respect and dignity in our funeral and burial rites because of their intrinsic connection to the person who has departed. This is the body in which this person lived and acted and loved and came to know God. However, we must realize that the material which makes up our bodies will, over time, cease to be even recognizable as a human body. Our bodies will break down into various parts that will enter into the earth: “Remember man, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
We also have to remember that the various bits of matter that compose our bodies are constantly being replaced: cells are frequently dying off and re-growing—some once a decade, some daily. From a strictly materialist point of view, one which would say that all we are is our physical bodies, one runs into the Ship of Theseus problem: if an old ship has one plank at a time replaced, at what point is it no longer the same ship? Applied to the human person: if my body is replaced one cell at a time, at what point am I no longer the same person? What is the principle of continuity from one point to another?
St. Thomas Aquinas used this fact as a point in favor of arguing for the resurrection. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas responds to a number of objections to the resurrection, all of which center around a common theme: if a person’s body rises from the dead, doesn’t that mean that every bit of matter that ever was part of his body must rise as well? Wouldn’t the resurrected body need to have every nail ever clipped, every hair ever cut, re-attached or re-formed? Wouldn’t this make the resurrected person a monstrosity?
St. Thomas replies, first, with the fact we began with: the soul is the form of the body. The soul constitutes certain material as a human body, a body which is the body of this person because it is informed by this person’s soul. The material parts of our body change over time. As we eat and excrete, as we grow and age, materials become part of our body and then cease to belong to it. What makes this material to be my body is that it is informed by my soul.
Thus, at the resurrection, God need not reassemble the former bits of your body like a broken vase in order for this to be your body; the resurrected body will be yours precisely because it is informed by your soul. The soul is the principle of continuity through the person’s life, death, and resurrection. It is the thing which exists all the way through.
Why, then, is the Church so concerned about keeping a person’s remains together? (The various heads and hands of certain saints notwithstanding.) Why, for example, is it opposed to scattering ashes?
This opposition is not due to some perceived need to keep all the person’s bodily remains adjacent to each other lest we make it too difficult upon God to resurrect them. Rather, it has to do with respect for the person. Even if a person’s corpse will eventually turn to dust, even if God will fashion him a new body from any material, still, the body which lies before us is indeed the body that was informed by the soul of this person, in which he lived and breathed and loved and sinned and was redeemed and came to know and love God in this life so that he could live with Him forever in the next.
To treat the bodies of the deceased no differently than a hermit crab’s discarded shell or a shed rattlesnake skin is to deny the integrity of the human person. Human beings are created to be a composite of body and soul. The interruption of this composition by death is so grievous precisely because it was not meant for us. (St. Thomas says that before the Fall, human beings would have been immortal because the body would have participated in the natural immortality of the soul.)
The body is not a meat machine temporarily inhabited by a ghost. It is a constituent part of a human person. To treat the bodies of the dead with dignity and integrity is to show respect to our nature as embodied persons.
The Vatican’s new directives on either mixing or separating (in a limited way) the remains of the dead do not violate this principle since, in each case, steps are taken to ensure respect for the individuality of the deceased. In short: we do our best to preserve the integrity of the remains of the deceased out of respect for them; but that doesn’t mean God is incapable of restoring that integrity should it be damaged.
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This is very good. Thank you.
Otherwise we have Heraclitus’ river, yes?
We really don’t know about this. Which is why all his detail is puzzling.
Dear Will, think ‘computer analogy’:
Visible, tangible hardware = our body.
Invisible, intangible software & personal data = our soul.
As a material computer ages, we replace it with a new one; yet the invisible, precious data we transfer is the valuable quality, even though it’s intangible.
Nearly 2 millennia ago, Saint Paul provided a searching explanation in 1 Corinthians 15. A sample:
“So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown (like a seed) is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body . . . flesh & blood cannot inherit The Kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the perishable.”
Basically, our distinct, individual software & data is us, our soul; we are not the hardware – our ever-changing body – that our software runs on, in this world.
The promise of resurrection is that God will purify our soul software and give us an eternal spiritual hardware body to run on through all eternity in the joy of Heaven. Because our soul software & data is idiosyncratic, our new spiritual body will express our godly Catholic characteristics, enabling us to be recognized as the same person.
Not to be missed!
Should there be NO godly Catholic character in our soul, God’s gift of a spiritual body will be void because our software is incompatible with Heaven’s new hardware.
Definitely to be avoided!
Ever in the love of King Jesus Christ – Promise Keeper; blessings from marty
CORRECTION
“flesh & blood cannot inherit The Kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”
Dr M J Rice, Great analogy – Software / Hardware!
“Why, then, is the Church so concerned about keeping a person’s remains together? (The various heads and hands of certain saints notwithstanding.) Why, for example, is it opposed to scattering ashes?”
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I find it hard to understand why it is okay for saints to have their body parts/bones scattered about for veneration, but not okay to be cremated, placed on a shelf at home by loved ones. Makes no sense.
.
It seems like the Chruch should have one standard for all.
Mrs. Hess, I think that the men who have run the church over the centuries are still learning just as we all are. In some cases the blind leading the blind. Periodically there are more enlightened leaders who can envision a broader view of the Deposit of Faith based on their own growth and development as souls…and so we all progress a little at a time … together. Slow but sure…
So if I tell people before I die, that it’s OK to scatter my ashes after cremation, then they’ll respect my wishes right?
Did any part of this resemble a prediction about whether the people you know (but whom none of us know) will respect your wishes? The discussion is much more about what people SHOULD do, and why.
Not only do we have the example of the Resurrection of Christ, we also have the accounts of people being raised from the dead in both the Old Testament and the New Testament — and also after the age of the Apostles had closed. In EVERY CASE the corpse was raised as a living body; whatever matter had been part of the body at the time of death was now part of the body that was raised. No new body was assembled out of other dust while the old corpse remained. This is a fact too important to be ignored.
It could be claimed, of course, that if Jesus resurrected into a new body composed of the matter from all His haircuts over 33 years, the continued existance of a dead Body in the tomb would have made it very reasonable to reject the idea of the Resurrection altogether. Therefore it was necessary that the resurrected body be made of the material of the dead corpse. That same necessity will not apply to us at the General Resurrection, however, because faith will yield to sight. The problem is that at EVERY instance where the dead have been raised, the corpse no longer remains as dead matter.
Another thing to consider is that even when the human soul of Jesus was separated from His body, His divinity was separated from neither.
Finally, the Eucharist is indeed the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. It has both the substance (body) and form (soul), but not the accidents (size, shape, mass, color, etc.). I think it is fair to say that so long as we do not fully understand that (which is perhaps impossible for us in this life and maybe also in the next), we cannot fully understand what “body” actually means.
Christ our Great High Priest partook of the sacred Host and Chalice at the Last Supper consummating through this Covenant of His humanity His own solemn pledge to the Father and initiating and securing for us our own personal unity He would win for us through the Sacred Sacrifice.
That’s pious and true, but it is also a non-sequitur. The only reason I brought up the Eucharist was to point out that what we usually associate with bodies (properties like size, shape, color, and mass) are not essential to being a body, and this might have some relevance to the question of “What is a person’s body?” in the resurrection.
Miracles of bilocation make something of the same point, but they do not command the kind of dogmatic certainty that the Eucharist does.
It can’t be non sequitur since all good is given by God and comes from Him through our Lord, Divine High Priest.
Take the demoniacs that Jesus rescued, piety was absent and they were subject to their condition which was a truth. Jesus changed that.
Your concern with “body” is resolved in the Divine Wisdom Who is our Light in our ignorance – progression from ignorance – adherence to Him. He is our Light notwithstanding any non-comprehension. He is the Light taking progression further and further as it should go. He is the Power that sustains it for the purpose.
Whereat substantive deficiency is from sin.
But Christ is our “point of departure”. This phrase was a favourite of JPII of happy memory. With Him -Christ- we embark into what He brings forth next. This Christ at the “crossroads”.
Even if we are cremated or eaten by wild beasts, Christ reassembles us. What might be troubling to some is the prospect that their resurrection will be given them through a priest doing the work of the Lord there.
Even though our bodies will have the same elements these will be glorified and they will have their own new and special accentuations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Pantocrator
From The Miracle of Calanda:
‘ On April 27, 1641, the archbishop of Zaragoza pronounced a judgment, thereby officially declaring the authenticity of the miracle. At the end of the year Pellicer was also invited to the royal court at Madrid, where King Philip IV knelt down before him and kissed the leg. Recordings also show that the restored leg was the same one as that which had been amputated two and a half years before, for it could be reidentified through some bruises and scars that were there before the amputation. Also, the hole in the cemetery of the hospital of Zaragoza in which the leg had been buried was excavated and found empty. ‘
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Calanda
https://www.santantonio.org/en/content/saint-anthonys-miracles-re-attached-foot
https://digilander.libero.it/raxdi/porres/inglese/pmiracoli.html
Dear Outis, I thoroughly agree with you: “this fact is too important to ignore.”
Resurrection of the dead is an umbrella term, and it covers at least 3 distinct phenomena.
The simplest is when a human has definitely died, and their dead body is revivified. The most dramatic example is Jesus’ miraculous resurrection of His friend Lazarus after 4 days in the tomb. Of course, such resurrected bodies don’t seem to have any special qualities and the person will age and die, just like everyone else.
The second is the unique example of The Son of God/Son of Man, Jesus Christ. His Resurrection was a combination of His fatally wounded material body with an eternal supernatural reality, that enabled His precious wounds to remain open, enabled Him to appear & disappear, & enabled Him to enter locked rooms. It was this supernaturally transformed human body that ascended through a portal in materiality to sit beside Father God, on the Throne of Glory, in the eternity of Heaven. The First Born.
There, Jesus Christ is worshipped & adored by all the holy angels, saints & martyrs: “Worthy, worthy, worthy is The Lamb who was slain!” His is a very special reality in that The Lamb was slain from (& for) the creation of our universe (Revelation 13:8b; 1 Peter 1:20; etc.). He is the beginning & the end, the first & the last, the alpha & omega. He is abundantly sufficient to give His Holy Flesh (real food) & Precious Blood (real drink) to the millions of faithful believers who call on His Name, until the end of time. The most pressing need of every person is to have Jesus, The Lamb of God.
The third meaning of Resurrection applies to all human beings. When our soul separates from our body at death it may, by grace, be given an eternal spiritual body mentioned by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. E.g. “flesh & blood (meaning materiality) cannot inherit The Kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” This heavenly imperishability is the highest ambition of every faithful Catholic, so as to live with God & all who have loved God, from across the world & throughout the ages. A truly wonderful family.
It is important to discern the differences between these three sorts of resurrection.
Hoping this is helpful.
Take care. Ever in the love of The Lamb of God; blessings from marty
Yes, and I was careful to maintain those distinctions, as I would hope you noticed.
The Resurrection of Christ is, of course, unique, yet our own resurrections at the end of time are explicitly said to be “like” His, and He left an empty tomb. So did all those whose “dead bod[ies] [were] revivified”.
The problem many people have is, “What happens when we lose sight of a body?” The persecutors of the Church in the Roman Empire thought that if they reduced the bodies of martyrs to ashes and dumped the ashes in the river, that would prevent any resurrection. Worshipers of Osiris would have agreed, but Christians knew better. God can as easily keep track of the scattered pieces of a human body as He could keep track of the scattered bloodline of King David.
OK, so let’s make up a stereotypical “problem case”. A missionary is eaten by cannibals, who then all die shortly afterward, because they had no immunity to a disease the missionary was carrying. The flesh of the missionary had become part of the bodies of cannibals; to whom would it belong in the resurrection?
First of all, it’s worth noting how similar such a question is to what the Sadducees asked in Matthew 22.
Secondly, even cannibals never eat ALL of a body. They don’t eat the bones or the hair, for example, and they will spill a fair amount of blood in butchering the missionary. “But there won’t be enough left of him to make a full body from what was not eaten!” Think back to the miracles of the loaves and the fishes. God has no problem mulitplying matter. (This is thought to apply also to the not-really-miraculous but poorly understood phenomenon of Dark Energy.) I doubt any human body has so thoroughly been consumed by others, even after tens or hundreds of thousands of years, that no part remains unincoporated into other bodies, and the unincorporated parts can be multiplied.
The greatest uncertainty comes from the part of my comment that you ignored: We do not really understand bodies, and we do not really understand matter. All this time we have been talking about bodies and matter from the point of view of everyday, classical physics. Classical physics is, however, not really correct. Our best understanding of matter (which is probably also just an approximation to its real nature) is that it obeys quantum physics instead, and that particles like protons and neutrons (and the quarks tha make them up) and electrons are absolutely indistinguishable. Quantum indistinguishablity doesn’t mean it is hard to tell two electrons apart; it means that the question has no meaning, and we ALWAYS have to account for the possibility that the electrons have exchanged places, an exchange which has real consequences for how the electrons behave. Classical behavior only emerges when (among other things) the probability of such an exchange becomes small enough to ignore, even though in principle it is always there.
Dear ‘Outis’, thank you for your responses. I sense you’re much concerned about the fundamental material parts of our human person, despite their constant flux & interchangeability.
We could contextualize this in terms of the physical reality that our organs, tissues & cells are composed of atoms derived from the epiphenomenal, quantum interactions of quarks, gluons, & leptons. Their existence is CONTINGENT upon a mystery of Physics – the partial quantum vacuum (pqv). Once our universe goes full quantum vacuum (its resting or default state) all materials disappear. Science teaches us that everything in our universe is ‘on loan’ from the pqv, as it were.
This is remarkably consonant with Jesus’ explanation given at Luke 16:9-12. The LORD says that what we have in this world is temporary, on loan. We are given it as a ‘trial run’. How we handle what is impermanent determines whether we get to inherit what will be permanently ours.
Beloved Apostle John gives us a prophetic vision of a New Heaven and a New Earth, replacing this universe, which will disappear (‘apelthan’).
In fact, that’s the Christian experience: of being able to seek perfection of our souls, even as our brains & bodies age, decay, & die. Our ever-changing, temporary flesh is a vehicle for the spiritual development potential (sanctification) of our eternal souls. This is the reason that salvation in Jesus Christ is not followed by immediate ascension to heaven.
I need to live a life in my body so as to sanctify my redeemed soul, a sanctification that will be reflected in my eternal, heavenly life. This supplies an eternal reason as to why my body is meaningful.
What of those who have very little in this life? In Luke 12:48, we find Jesus explaining God’s proportional justice: much will demanded of those who have received much in this life; little will be asked from those who have had little.
Thus, materiality is very important, but it is a temporary construct, a necessary vehicle for our spiritual rebirth and maturing, in preparation for our enduring family membership in God’s New Jerusalem.
This is consonant with our LORD’s teaching at John 6:63 that it is the Spirit that generates, whilst materiality counts for nothing. In other words, material things are not able to generate Spirit, but Spirit is able to generate all things, including materiality.
Thus, we Catholics are able to inform scientists that Spirit causes the partial quantum vacuum, so enabling our space-time/energy-matter universe to exist for long enough to achieve God’s purposes. To God, 13.8 billion years are as one day!
So, yes, fleshly materiality has its purpose, but Spirit alone is of generating & enduring significance.
Maybe, in The New Jerusalem, our spiritual embodiment can have resonance with features of our past earthly body. In that way our past bodies could be eternally commemorated. Maybe not everyone would want that . . ?
Thank you for introducing a topic that has made me think; a topic that should be of maximum interest to every human soul!
Always seeking to hear & lovingly obey King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
Your lengthy response seems to be more geared to erroneous assumptions about me and about your own fitness to be some sort of spiritual director than to what I actually said. There are interesting questions involved here, but I suspect they are mysteries both in the sense of being largely unknown and in the sense of being worthy of being stored up and pondered in our hearts. However, your reply does not really help in either sense of the mystery.
Good day.
But the bodies (or at least the flesh) of most human beings who ever lived have long since decayed into their constituent atoms to be recycled into any number of other living things. The model of software & hardware described above makes sense of that reality. Personally, I find the idea of scattering ashes distasteful. At least keep the urn in a holy place.
An excellent book on how the medieval Church analyzed this issue is “Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity” by Caroline Walker Bynum. Those debates were going on in a society where the bodies of kings as well as saints would be divided and buried in different places. For instance, there were elaborate tombs for French kings’ intestines. For dead crusaders of means, their corpses were boiled down to separate out the bones and only those were sent home to Europe.
Since matter and energy are interchangeable, and we are primarily Energy (Soul) solidified into matter (embodied) the question remains confusing for the Ego. The Ego, (that part of me that identifies only with this body, this life experience) tends to fight for or expect that only what satisfies ME matters. This whole discussion is about Me Me Me…as we Learn, and Ascend spiritually we begin to enlarge our Identity to include others who are dear to us and eventually to include all the Living Beings who exist on this planet and beyond. Then the question becomes for us: Not how about Me and My Body…but How can I best Serve the Other members of this Common Humanity? Perhaps it takes more than one Life Experience to Grow to that Level of Ascension…to be more like Christ as He is revealed to us in the Gospels. I wish you all Peace.
Dear Kate Grace, it’s great to read of an active & compassionate mind seeking.
After over 80 years of a similar quest, am convinced there’s only one way we can: “be more like Christ as He is revealed to us in the Gospels.”
That is to recognize that the resurrected, risen & ascended Christ Jesus rules everything for God’s good purpose and that He is indeed with us, close & even within, until the end of time. Turning away from ‘Me, Me, Me’, we can ask Jesus’ forgiveness for our failures and ask Him to become King of Our Heart, and to shepherd us through life and into the glories of God’s eternal realm.
A good Catholic priest can be an excellent mentor as we learn to let go and, in loving obedience, live the rest of our everlasting life in friendship with our Servant King.
Take care and all the best with your pilgrimage.
Always in the grace & mercy of The Lamb of God; love & blessings from marty