Religion: One-Class Death

Like the weddings performed by Dog-patch’s Marryin’ Sam—who climaxes his deluxe $2.98 ceremony by thrusting a pair of lighted candles in his ears and jumping off a cliff whistling The Burning of Rome—French funerals come in several grades. It is the undertakers who set these grades, but the church has usually gone along. The cheapest funeral (about $30) is Class 6, which provides no more than a modest hearse, a quick ceremony. Those who want to depart in style can, for a price (as high as $3,000), have black crape hung from the church’s inner walls and black crape muffling the pews, black drapery with a white cross behind the altar, additional functionaries in cocked hats and a requiem Mass with 60 priests, acolytes and singers.

Last week Msgr. Henri Alexandre Chappoulie, bishop of Angers, came out solidly for funerary equality: henceforth his diocese (about 120 miles south of Paris) will permit only one class of funeral. (Exception: if the dead held an important place in the community, in which case “more priests or a bigger choir than usual” might be in order.) Specifications for the bishop’s standard funeral will correspond to the undertakers’ Class 4—two priests, one cantor, two choirboys, no deacon or archdeacon, no draperies or crape, six candles on the altar and eight at the catafalque. The church fee will be a flat $15; undertakers will have to make what profit they can on extras outside the church—ornate coffins, luxurious hearses, etc. The dead whose families cannot afford to pay even for the simplified funeral will be buried at the expense of the local government, and with no fee for the church.

“This business of equality can be carried too far,” grumbled one agitated undertaker. Commented Le Monde: “It may seem too cruel to force those in extremis who have never traveled third class or used the public transport services or had to go steerage to go to their last destination in circumstances which nothing in their lifetime has prepared them for, and to inflict on them a dying so completely contrary to their living. It would be charity to accustom them to equality at a slightly earlier date in their lives.”