Burying the dead; how it's done in Chicago.

Joseph Bernardin was waked and buried in Chicago a year ago this month with the funeral rites of the Roman Catholic church. This reportorial-like statement affirms something remarkable: Nothing more was needed to mourn and celebrate this much-loved archbishop than the basic rites of the church. Those who gathered found in the rites the expression of their grief, the experience of the hope the church affirms, and the ambiguity of lives lived by faith. The rites were trusted, done with attention, and allowed to do their work.

It was not because Bernardin was an archbishop that the rites spoke loudly, but because he was a baptized Catholic. Again and again they evoked a sense of death as both terrible and beautiful, a passing over in the love of God. This was the message of Bible and cross, of simple pall spread over the coffin, of eucharistic acclamation and Communion table.

The ritual strength experienced at the passing of Cardinal Bernardin happened not because of public attention or the cast of dignitaries, but in spite of them. Ritual that is worthy of the name is not made up for state occasions. It is already known by heart. When those who wear the signs of orders (diaconate, presbyterate, episcopacy) are first perceived as wearing the garments of baptism, then some deeply satisfying way of burying the dead has taken hold in the church.

This funeral in Chicago demonstrated how the renewed Roman rites allow the church to do its work: speaking, singing, processing, and keeping silence together. Such ritual draws out and confirms our praise, our laments, our intercessions. But the rites in question, and their enactment, did not come about by chance. They worked well because Chicago's Office for Divine Worship had attended to them for the previous twenty-seven years.

True, not every wake and funeral Mass in Chicago is done with the same dignity and power as those that surrounded the burial of Cardinal Bernardin. But the cardinal's funeral was beautiful ritual because the church in Chicago has striven for decades to develop good liturgy. As the cardinal's funeral made clear, a long-range, serious, and loving attention to liturgical renewal includes fidelity to the revised Roman rites. Not thoughtless rubricism but comprehension of the roots, intention, flow, ministries, and beauty of the rite makes the difference. Fidelity means, above all, understanding and doing what the documents have told us over and over:

* That the liturgy is the work of an assembly.

* That liturgy is sung, in large part by the assembly, in words and in melodies strong enough to bear the weight of their repetition. (Thus the various moments of this long funeral rite were filled with songs Chicagoans have begun to know by heart; they were not performance compositions meant for other occasions.)

* That the deeds of the liturgy should shape the space, not the space limit the ritual.

* That liturgy requires careful preparation so that it can be done with full devotion and attention.

* That ministers, all of whom are members of the assembly, should be perceived as taking part with the assembly in all the rites.

* That liturgy is ritual (what we know how to do by heart), not entertainment, nostalgia, or ego-gratification. It is not important that liturgy make us feel good; it is essential, however, that, through many repetitions, it prepare us to do good.

* That the liturgy is like a language the baptized learn slowly, a language of the love of God and of God's love for the world, a language that speaks in daily deeds of life and justice. Like a language, liturgy has an order, a rhythm, an interior structure. It can only make full sense in communion with others who are, till death, learning bit by bit to be eloquent in its language.

Chicago was able to bury Cardinal Bernardin in the full strength and beauty of our Roman rites because the ritual was already in our bones, muscles, hearts, and heads. For years, Bernardin had been burying others. Perhaps that is what so readied him to share his dying and death so openly. This is what happens when we grow up and eventually old in communities that bury their loved ones who have fallen asleep in the Lord: We get ready to die ourselves. That is the way ritual works, when we allow it to work.

The good work of years was manifest in another way: The rites were not performed self-consciously. Of course musicians and other artists and helpers were called from various parishes, and of course they came and worked together. Of course there was eloquence in the preaching. In this and much else there was a kind of inclusiveness that echoed Jesus' meals in the Gospels (meals that may seem a little irregular to some). Women were pallbearers (this the cardinal had made clear), and women preached and presided at the services of morning and evening prayer. Given all that, perhaps we should have rejoiced that so many noticed things were out of joint at the funeral Mass itself, when the visible assembly was so heavily clerical and male.

Here in Chicago, the generally inclusive and highly participatory manner of the Bernardin funeral did not seem odd or special. It was a natural expression of how we are learning to be church. For three days, Joseph Bernardin's body lay in the cathedral. During that time the central ritual action was a procession of 100,000 people. But that procession was essentially no different from the procession of 200 or of 20 who walk daily toward the coffins of those they love. Periodically during those days the church gathered to pray: first on receiving the body of Cardinal Bernardin at the cathedral, then for evening and morning prayers and the vigil services. These are the rites that are provided for in the Order of Christian Funerals for any Catholic who has died. For the cardinal's long wake, ecumenical and interfaith rites were also celebrated. Perhaps these should be seen not as rare exceptions, but as models for what would often be appropriate for ordinary Catholics who are mourned by more than Catholics.

The subject of the many verbs used in the funeral ritual of the Roman rite is the church itself. "We" bury our dead. The "we" is not reserved to the funeral of a bishop; it is used every time a Catholic is buried. And parishes manifest this every Sunday during the intercessory prayers when they name those who have died the previous week.

What happened at the Bernardin rites, then, was not something intended to be unique. Nor was it a collection of various and discrete rites: a wake service, a funeral Mass, the cemetery prayers. For Catholics, ritual can last through days. We experience it each year at the Triduum - from the evening of Holy Thursday until the day of Easter - which is essentially one ritual with many moments, rising and falling.

At the dying of a Christian, the ritual begins with the prayers associated with the believer's last hours. It continues after the person's death, accompanying the preparation of the body for burial, its reception at the church (in the cardinal's case, this included the liturgy of the hours and keeping vigil), the celebration of the Eucharist, and finally the community's procession to the place of burial. This is the pattern for every Catholic's passing: an ensemble of rites that open wide all the human and Christian experiences, from the time the person is dying to the burial. All these form a single ritual.

Such prolonged rites are not meant to be tidy or efficient. That is why Cardinal Bernardin directed that his final procession to the cemetery should pass through city streets, not via an expressway. Nor are the rites always perfectly honed. At the wake for the cardinal, an honor guard initially tried to ward off the people who wanted to touch the coffin and the body. But the people persisted, and the coffin grew gloriously dirty from being touched. This gesture of touching the coffin and the body seems to come instinctively. That is why the funeral rites call for family and others to make the sign of the cross on the body of the deceased. (Before the next cardinal dies, someone has to find alternative ways to use the energy of such honor guards.)

When next you hear someone speaking negatively about the renewal of the liturgy, remember the funeral of Cardinal Bernardin. It demonstrated what happens when the church comes together, well-prepared from good and long-practiced habits, to do fittingly what it must and is privileged to do. Just thirty-some years after Vatican II, what happened in Chicago for three days last November was a sign of hope, of consolation, and of prayer well-made.

Gabe Huck is the director of Liturgy Training Publications, an agency of the Archdiocese of Chicago. This article was written with assistance from Martin Connell, Maria Leonard, David Philippart, and Vicky Tufano.