What is the significance of a Catholic funeral?
Firstly, the significance of a funeral is to acknowledge someone that you've loved who has died, and to bury someone in a dignified way. Within a Catholic funeral, it's to bring out the dignity of the person. A Catholic funeral recognizes that in baptism, as an infant or as an adult. That person has become a temple of God's spirit, so the body has been a dwelling place of God. In death it's reverenced. In actual fact, the ending ceremony of the funeral rite ends with the incensing of the body which is in the coffin, with holy water sprinkled on it, reminding them of the divinity that was dwelling in the person, even in us as a Christian today. Catholic funerals then bring a particular sense of hope, and any Christian funeral, not just Catholic, brings a sense of hope in the midst of that: hope that this is not the end, that whatever we see as a person before us in the coffin, that this relationship that we enjoyed with them in life will continue even in death. It continues with God, and we look forward to the day of the Resurrection when, in the resurrection of Christ we will see our loved ones who have gone before us. So Catholic funerals, Christian funerals really, are marked with the characteristic of hope, that it's not an end, that it's just like saying goodbye and we'll meet them again.
