Funeral Masses In Cases Of Suicide

A reader writes:

Is a funeral mass permitted for a person who committed suicide?

The rule on who can receive a funderal Mass is Canon 1185:

Any funeral Mass must also be denied a person who is excluded from ecclesiastical funerals.

This means you have to look at the previous Canon (1184) to find out who can be granted ecclesastical funerals:

§1. Unless they gave some signs of repentance before death, the following must be deprived of ecclesiastical funerals:

1/ notorious apostates, heretics, and schismatics;

2/ those who chose the cremation of their bodies for reasons contrary to Christian faith;

3/ other manifest sinners who cannot be granted ecclesiastical funerals without public scandal of the faithful.

§2. If any doubt occurs, the local ordinary is to be consulted, and his judgment must be followed.

No mention is made in this canon of suicide cases. The closest it comes is §1 no. 3, which refers to manifest sinners, but it qualifies this, restricting it to the individuals who cannot be granted funerals without scandal being given to the faithful. Scandal does not mean offending the sensibilities of the faithful. It means leading the faithful into sin. But allowing a funeral for an ordinary person who has committed suicide will be construed as an act of mercy on a person who did something wrong–not an endorsement of suicide–and thus will not result in scandal to the faithful. Thus an ordinary suicide victim would not be prohibited from having an ecclesiastical funeral or a funeral Mass.

This is not to say that all suicide victims can be given funeral Masses. Some may not be able to because doing so would cause scandal to the faithful, but this is not the case with an ordinary suicide.

Happy Fixed Blogiversary!

Today is my fixed blogiversary (Feb. 25). My movable blogiversary is Ash Wednesday.

The reason I have two blogiversaries is that I wrote my first post (a review of The Passion of the Christ, which I had just come from seeing) on Ash Wednesday last year, which was Feb. 25th.

It was the day the movie opened, and it seemed like a good day to open the blog I had been thinking about, too.

So here we are, one year out.

In that year I switched from doing a home-designed blog in FrontPage to a professional level blog using Moveable Type. It acquired its own domain name. It migrated from cox.net to TypePad (about 10 months ago). And since that time it’s racked up almost a third of a million hits (will probably hit that mark in about a week), had 1171 posts, 5767 comments, won the best apologetics blog award from CyberCatholics, and evolved from being an insignificant microbe to a marauding marsupial in the TTLB ecosystem (large mammal or bust!).

INSTANT UPDATE: While getting the link for my page in the TTLB ecosystem, I just discovered that we not only have evolved into a large mammal (at least for the moment), we have also cracked the top 1000 blogs in the ecosystem (at this moment we’re #995).

YEEEEEEE-HAW!!!

Thanks, y’all, for making this an extra-special first fixed blogiversary!!!

Biggest Stellar Blast (Short Of The Big Bang) Detected

The biggest stellar blast ever detected (other than the Big Bang) has been detected.

50,000 years ago, a magnetar 50,000 light years away blew its top in the gamma-ray (not visible light) spectrum and outshone the rest of the galaxy. The flash reached earth December 27 and briefly altered Earth’s atmosphere.

The commotion was caused by a special variety of neutron star known as a magnetar. These fast-spinning, compact stellar corpses — no larger than a big city — create intense magnetic fields that trigger explosions. The blast was 100 times more powerful than any other similar eruption witnessed, said David Palmer of Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of several researchers around the world who monitored the event with various telescopes.

"Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

There are no magnetars close enough to worry about, however, Gaensler and two other astronomers told SPACE.com. But the strength of the tempest has them marveling over the dying star’s capabilities while also wondering if major species die-offs in the past might have been triggered by stellar explosions.

GET THE STORY.

Miss Gould

I are a writer-feller.

I writes a lot.

I also work with editors and proofreaders a lot and have sometimes served in those capacities.

Here on the blog, I don’t have an editor or proofreader, so a significant number of typos get through, but that’s par for the course in the blogosphere. Other, more hit-laden bloggers than I have expressed their gratitude for the slack readers give them over typos. When you’re cranking out stuff in the rapidfire manner that blogging typically requires (what with fitting it around a day job and all), typos are bound to get through, and it is much appreciated when folks don’t sweat the small stuff.

It is also appreciated, however, when a reader points out a real howler. F’rinstance: One reader recently pointed out to me that the phrase I had intended to be "does not" had a misplaced space so that it read "doe snot."

The subject was not deer hunting.

Change made.

All of my dead-tree writing, though, does go through editors and proofreaders. These folks don’t get the credit that they deserve for the valueable work they do.

IT’S NICE TO SEE CREDIT BEING GIVEN.

(And it’s a fascinating look into the world of publishing that rings true to my experience of it.)

I Feel All Googley

Referrers

On my hits & referrers page I get a list of where many of the folks visiting the site zoomed in from. Some are coming in from search engines like Google, and if I click on the link provided it takes me to the page on Google (or whatever) that they were on, so I can see the search terms they typed in to the engine. I also see where my page is in the the search engine’s ranks.

Often I’m intrigued by what I find.

Some tidbits:

  • The initial post on the passing of Sr. Lucia turns up at the top of the list if you type in "Sr. Lucia" on Google.
  • The post Double Crime Recap!!! is right at the top if you type in "What happened to Sharonna on Monk" on Google.
  • The post The Liger Sleeps Tonight? gets a surprising number of search engine hits. I’m often intrigued by what people type in to get it. Some are very blunt ("liger picture"), others suspicious ("liger hoax"), and some are child-like ("picture of the liger"–as if there were only one).

At least these are the way things are right now. I’m sure over time other pages will come to prominence on these issues, given the way Google technology works.

Sometimes it isn’t what is in the post itself that is driving the search engine’s rank. Sometimes it’s what’s in the comments section, so kudos to all y’all for adding value to the site via your comments!

Dark Galaxy, Dark Energy, Dark Planet

SCIENTISTS HAVE "SPOTTED" THE FIRST GALAXY MADE (MOSTLY) OF DARK MATTER.

Cool!

The new galaxy is named VIRGOHI21, and it’s around 50 million light years away.

We have no idea how common these things are in the universe. They may be all around us, conspiring sinisterly against the sun-litten universe.

Excerpts:

Theorists have long said most of the universe is made of dark matter. Its presence is required to explain the extra gravitational force that is observed to hold regular galaxies together and that also binds large clusters of galaxies.

Theorists also believe knots of dark matter were integral to the formation of the first stars and galaxies. In the early universe, dark matter condensed like water droplets on a spider web, the thinking goes. Regular matter — mostly hydrogen gas — was gravitationally attracted to a dark matter knot, and when the density became great enough, a star would form, marking the birth of a galaxy.

The theory suggests that pockets of pure dark matter ought to remain sprinkled across the cosmos. In 2001, a team led by Neil Trentham of the University of Cambridge predicted the presence of entire dark galaxies.

Dark matter makes up about 23 percent of the universe’s mass-energy budget. Normal matter, the stuff of stars, planets and people, contributes just 4 percent. The rest of the universe is driven by an even more mysterious thing called dark energy.

Dark energy is thought to be the force pushing the universe apart faster and faster.

LEARN MORE ABOUT DARK ENERGY.

But some dispute the existence of dark energy.

ONE GUY IS HOPING NEW MEASUREMENTS OF THE MOON’S ORBIT WILL EXPLAIN IT AWAY.

I bet they know the answer to these questions on the dark planet Yuggoth.

"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth – great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad – yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges – things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids – ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.

"But remember – that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age.

LEARN MORE ABOUT YUGGOTHPLUTO.

The Most Under-Reported Stories Of 2004

Every year WorldNetDaily comes out with a list of the ten most under-reported stories of the preceding year.

HERE’S THIS YEAR’S LIST.

I agree with most of them. Most were woefully under-reported.

But I’m not with them on the idea that al-Qa’eda bought a bunch of nukes years ago. If they had ’em, they’d a used them by now. (‘Course that doesn’t mean they haven’t acquired them recently, unfortunately.)