Commentary: CDF instruction on cremation - affirming the status quo while opening the door to further concessions.Zenit report: Cardinal Müller clarifies -- "not a mortal sin", "not prohibited" to scatter ashes of the deceased or turn these to mementos

Merely a preference.

The new CDF instruction on burial and cremation, which was released yesterday, is being hailed in the Catholic media as a reaffirmation of the Church's "strong preference" for burial. One finds headlines that speak of the document as putting "restrictions" on cremation, or as instituting "strict conditions" upon it. Unfortunately, after a careful reading of the document and considering the pervasive culture of permissions and exceptions in the Church, we are compelled to come to different conclusions.

To put the new instruction in context, we need to revisit the first document by which the Holy See relaxed the traditional ban on cremation on a global scale: the instruction Piam et constantem, issued by the Holy Office in 1963 and published in L' Osservatore Romano and Acta Apostolicae Sedis the following year. (An English translation of this document can be found here.) Written with the customary brevity and clarity of the old Holy Office, it speaks of the various temporal reasons that compelled the Holy Office to "relax somewhat the prescriptions of canon law touching on cremation". Henceforth, cremation was permitted, as long as it was not chosen due to "anti-Christian motives". However, it remained officially discouraged (even if no longer forbidden). This was made abundantly clear in the first and fourth articles of the instruction:

All necessary measures must be taken to preserve the practice of reverently burying the faithful departed. Accordingly, through proper instruction and persuasion Ordinaries are to ensure that the faithful refrain from cremation and not discontinue the practice of burial except when forced to do so by necessity. For the Church has always maintained the practice of burial and consecrated it through liturgical rites.

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The devout attitude of the faithful toward the ecclesiastical tradition must be kept from being harmed and the Church's adverse attitude toward cremation must be clearly evident. Therefore the rites of ecclesiastical burial and the ensuing suffrages may never be carried out at the place of cremation itself, not even simply to accompany the body as it is being brought there.

Cardinal Takes Part in Pagan Worship in Argentina

"Pachamama" is the animist/pagan "goddess" of the earth for a number of Andean tribes. It remained mostly dormant or mythical for centuries with the successful evangelization of the Altiplano and the Andes by Spanish and native missionaries, but the efforts of different groups in the past few decades (including radical liberal "Catholic" religious) have strongly revived this pagan worship.

In a trip to the pope's native land of Argentina for the "Ecumenical Social Forum" in November 2014, (in San Marcos Sierras, Province of Córdoba, western Argentina), Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture and who was created a cardinal by Benedict XVI, spent a few minutes worshiping and presenting his homage to the goddess Pachamama, as the video below recorded. The video was released only very recently:

Bp. Athanasius Schneider on the Synod, "manipulation", and the "neo-pagan" and heterodox midterm relatio - Midterm relatio a stain on the honor of the Apostolic See

Polonia Christiana

November 4/5, 2014

The Church and the world do urgently need intrepid and candid witnesses of the whole truth of the commandment and of the will of God, of the whole truth of Christ’s words on marriage. Modern clerical Pharisees and Scribes, those bishops and cardinals who throw grains of incense to the neo-pagan idols of gender ideology and concubinage, will not convince anyone to either believe in Christ or to be ready to offer their lives for Christ - said + Athanasius Schneider Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan in interview with Izabella Parowicz.

Your Excellency, what is Your Excellency’s opinion about the Synod? What is its message to families?

During the Synod there had been moments of obvious manipulation on the part of some clerics who held key positions in the editorial and governing structure of the Synod. The interim report (Relatio post disceptationem) was clearly a prefabricated text with no reference to the actual statements of the Synod fathers. In the sections on homosexuality, sexuality and “divorced and remarried” with their admittance to the sacraments the text represents a radical neo-pagan ideology. This is the first time in Church history that such a heterodox text was actually published as a document of an official meeting of Catholic bishops under the guidance of a pope, even though the text only had a preliminary character.