Catholic funeral services expand

France’s Catholic Funeral Service, which offers religious mortuary services in a country where undertaking was long a public monopoly, doubled in size for All Saints’ Day with new branches in three dioceses, writes Tom Heneghan. The service, launched in Paris in 2000 and later followed by Versailles and Bordeaux Dioceses, opened branches in Marseilles, Lyons and Fréjus-Toulon that will prepare bodies, provide coffins and perform burials within a Catholic context.

The steady expansion of the fledgling service, which expects to conduct about 1,100 of around 500,000 burials in France this year, goes against the growing commercialisation of the funeral sector since the country ended its municipal monopoly in 1993.

France created that monopoly in 1904. Cities and towns ran their own secular pompes funèbres to perform all formalities – except the optional funeral Mass in church – and buried the dead in public cemeteries. The end of the monopoly led to a plethora of competing private funeral businesses focused on profit. “The funeral businesses prefer to offer a kind of paraliturgy, with texts like those of Khalil Gibran whose message is far from that of the Gospel,” said Fr Denis Honnorat, vicar general of Marseilles. “This service lets the Church accompany people with a message of hope.”