Funeral for a Friend

Last week I drove West towards KCMO for the funeral of a grade school, high school classmate and friend. Patrick was one of those steady presences from childhood, the kind of person who occupies a permanent room in your memory, even if life scatters you to different cities and decades.

The funeral was held at Christ the King Church in Kansas City. It was reverent. Intentional. And, for many of us formed in post–Vatican II Catholicism, it felt like stepping into a time capsule. The priest celebrated Mass facing the same direction as the congregation: toward the altar and the back wall. Communion was received kneeling, on the tongue, along an altar rail. There was no Sign of Peace. The homily was not a eulogy. It was not even particularly biographical. At one point, Father referenced a biology frog, a classroom image used to illustrate a theological truth, rather than recounting Patrick’s life story. 

And for a moment, I felt the tension rise in the pews.

After Mass, a high school classmate, Paul, now a convert to Judaism, approached the priest. He had flown in from California and was candid: why travel across the country to hear about a frog when we came to celebrate the life of a great friend? Why no stories? Why no legacy? Why no eulogy?

The priest replied simply: that is not allowed in the Catholic Church. I bit my tongue.

I have attended hundreds of Catholic funerals. I have heard priests tell stories. I have heard sons, daughters, siblings, and friends speak beautifully and at length. One funeral in particular, James Gunn, Sr. comes to mind where four children spoke for 20–30 minutes each, weaving together a tapestry of memory and tribute to their father.

So, which is it? Is an eulogy allowed? Or not? The answer is both simpler and more complicated than we might think.

Officially, the Catholic Church teaches that the homily at a Funeral Mass is to focus on Scripture, on Christ’s death and resurrection, and on prayer for the deceased, not on a eulogy. The emphasis is theological, not biographical. The Mass is offered for the repose of the soul. It is worship directed toward God. That was the instinct at Christ the King. The parish regularly celebrates the Traditional Latin Mass. The tone is intentionally reverent, restrained, and vertical, oriented toward heaven. In that liturgical spirituality, the funeral is not primarily a celebration of a well-lived life, but an intercession for a soul entrusted to mercy.

For those formed in that tradition, telling stories during Mass can feel like shifting the spotlight from God to the individual.

For many American Catholics formed after Vatican II, however, funerals have evolved. The Church’s theology did not change, but the pastoral expression did. White vestments became common. The language of “celebration of life” entered our vocabulary. Brief remembrances, and sometimes extended ones, became part of the lived experience of Catholic funerals in many parishes.

So, when my classmate asked his question, he wasn’t being irreverent. He was reacting out of love. He wanted Patrick remembered. Named. Celebrated. And in that moment, I realized we were witnessing not a violation, not a rebellion, but a contrast of emphases.

The older liturgical instinct says: Pray for the soul.  The newer pastoral instinct often says: Celebrate the life. Both flow from love. They simply express it differently.

The irony was not lost on me that the priest, a married convert to Catholicism and former Lutheran pastor, represented something very post–Vatican II in his personal journey, while celebrating a pre–Vatican II liturgical style. If you were writing a screenplay, you might not dare script that combination. Yet there it was: a married Catholic priest offering a Requiem-style funeral with no eulogy and a biology frog in the homily. Catholicism is nothing if not layered.

As I reflect on it now, I think the frog actually makes sense. Patrick’s life, like all of ours, was part of something larger. A created order. A grand design. The priest’s point, however unexpected, was likely theological: that life itself, in all its fragile complexity, points beyond itself.

Still, I understand why some of us wanted stories. We wanted to hear about the kid we knew.
The friend we laughed with. The man who left a mark. And yet, perhaps the quiet restraint was its own form of reverence.

Because at the altar, the Church insists on something bracingly countercultural: even the most beloved life is ultimately placed in God’s hands, not on display before an audience.

The stories? They came later. In the gathering spaces. In the hugs. In the long conversations after Mass. Around tables. In the parking lot. At the BAR on Strawberry Hill, where we got our intake of Vitamin G! That is where Patrick’s legacy was told and retold.

And maybe that, too, has wisdom in it. The liturgy was prayed. The people remembered.

I don’t write this to critique the parish or to defend it. I write it because the experience revealed something about how differently we can encounter the same Church. For some, reverence is kneeling at a rail. For others, it is speaking a brother’s tribute. For some, the frog was a distraction. For others, it was a metaphor for creation and eternity. For all of us, though, the reason we gathered was the same: love for a friend.

Love is what traveled from California, from Houston, from St. Louis, from decades past. It filled the pews whether stories were spoken or not. Patrick was prayed for. Patrick was remembered. Patrick was loved. Perhaps, in the mystery of Catholic worship, in Latin or English, facing east or facing the people, shouldn’t be a “thing”!  In the end, the Church did what she has always done at a funeral: she prayed. Not to erase a life, but to entrust it. Not to diminish a story, but to place it inside a larger one. Patrick’s biography lives in us, in laughter, in memory, in the complex chess matches, in the way certain names still feel like childhood. The liturgy, however, pointed beyond biography to eternity. And maybe that tension, between memory and mystery, is not something to resolve, but something to hold.