All things must pass. (Odds & Ends).

George Harrison, who died last December, was lucky he wasn't a Catholic in Rhode Island. In the Providence diocese, by order of its bishop, secular music cannot be played at Catholic funerals. So the corpus of this Beatle's songs, many of them highly spiritual, would have been banned at his own funeral.

Somehow this ecclesiastical dragnet aimed at all secular music got focused almost exclusively on the song "Danny Boy" in recent months. I don't think George Harrison nor his family would have been particularly interested in having "Danny Boy" played at his funeral.

But many Irish American Catholics think it is their divine right to have "Danny Boy" played or piped at their funerals. Now it all depends where you live. Clearly, in Rhode Island it's not going to happen. But just down the road in New York, many of the firefighters and police officers who lost their lives the morning of September 11 have been buried to the tune of "Danny Boy," as have hosts of other faithful.

I wonder how many proudly Irish Catholics, inside or outside Rhode Island, know that the words to their favorite dirge were actually written by an Englishman. In 1913 Frederick Edward Weatherly set them to the music of "Londonderry Aire," a 17th-century Irish folk song. Talk about multiculturalism!

Lots of other secular songs have found their way into sacred funeral liturgies. "I Did It My Way" is probably the all-time winner, crooned at many a funeral. One of my colleagues, the late William G. Thompson, S.J., claimed that John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane" had been sung at a Catholic funeral. I was always suspicious of that story. Bill, who planned his own funeral before he died, opted for more traditional songs, among them "Take Lord, Receive," a prayer from Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Good that Ignatius wasn't a rock star of his generation. Otherwise this song too might be muted.

Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," his first big hit after the Beatles break-up, appeared on All Things Must Pass, his first solo album. "Harrison made songs with explicitly spiritual lyrics commercially viable--baptized them, so to speak--and opened the door for the development of the Christian music market," says theologian Todd Johnson.

Harrison was hauled into court, not for the lyrics of "My Sweet Lord," but for its melody, which litigators claimed he cribbed from the 1963 song "He's So Fine." The case dragged on for an eternity, and eventually Harrison had to pay. The writer of "Danny Boy" was much luckier. He never had to answer to authorities for using the melody of "Londonderry Aire" for "Danny Boy."

All things must pass, as George Harrison was fond of saying. He said it after the Beatles breakup in 1970. When he died, his family's statement read, "He left this world as he lived in it, conscious of God, fearless of death, and at peace surrounded by family and friends. He often said, `Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another.'" Sounds suspiciously spiritual to me.

To Catholics in Rhode Island, take heart. George was right: All things must pass. Maybe this ban on some of the most spiritual music that has become categorized as "secular" will pass as well.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.