Vatican newspaper: funerals are crucial moments in the new evangelization

December 16, 2017

In a front-page L’Osservatore Romano op-ed, Italian historian Lucetta Scaraffia said that a time of declining religious practice, funerals are important occasions for the new evangelization.

Scaraffia, a frequent contributor to the Vatican newspaper, wrote that priests should not devote homilies to establishing familiarity with the deceased: such attempts may strike hearers as insincere. Nor should a priest speak “solely of love, of joy, of continuity.”

Instead, said Scaraffia, priests should preach about the teaching of Jesus on life and death and how He confronted death; nor should priests fear to discuss abandonment, solitude, and our own death.

 

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Further information:

• I luoghi della nuova evangelizzazione (L’Osservatore Romano)