As culture coarsens, bad taste tyrannizes good taste. We may be fascinated in a prurient way when celebrities embarrass themselves by hurling vulgar epithets at each other, but they do not have a monopoly on tawdriness. When anyone focuses on the self instead of God, even the great ceremonies of life turn into tawdry displays of lost dignity.

The Church regulates the Rite of Marriage to prevent bridal processions from resembling the entrance of Cleopatra into the sacred city of Thebes. In our parish the services of professional wedding planners, those major-domos of social collapse, are not desired. Hard experience of funerals turned into extravagant canonizations has taught the wisdom of proclaiming the Gospel of the Resurrection instead of eulogizing the pleasant aspects of the departed.

Recent state funerals of public figures showed the inherent decorum of civil ceremonies. However, some politicians and clergymen have an itch to ransack military form, turning sanctuaries into platforms for self-display, replete with awkward jokes and skittish theology. “It’s all about me.” One’s moment in the sun can cause sun­stroke. At President Reagan’s sunset burial, his local minister did a bad imitation of Lady Thatcher. Another nadir of taste was reached by the clergyman at President Ford’s funeral who went off on a tangent about a recent convention of his denomination, probably to the bewilderment of heads of state. Pericles ached that day.

President Kennedy died before rubrical brakes were removed from the Liturgy, and not even Cardinal Cushing’s atonality diminished the solemn cadences of the ancient Requiem offered for the remission of sin.

On January 8, 1919, Theodore Roosevelt was buried in Oyster Bay. He was Dutch Reformed but rather skittish about theological matters. Natural virtue was his occu­pation and he had an eye for it in others. He called Cardinal Gibbons the greatest living American and he showed his ad­­mir­­­ation for St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher by hang­ing their pictures in his study. At the funeral in his wife’s local parish church, which held far fewer people than ours, there was no eulogy and no music, although a minister recited the hymn “How Firm a Foundation.” His estranged friend, President Taft, praised him by his silent attendance, and all that might be said of bravery was testified mutely by the battle flags on his coffin. In place of fulsome cant, the last prayer read was one written by Cardinal Newman. It had been the favorite of the President’s son Quentin who had been killed in battle the previous summer in France:

“O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in Your mercy, give us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last.”