More and more our popular crutule promotes the non-Christian attitude that our bodies belong to us and not to God. The extreme, compulsive sign of this is the art of disfiguring the body with tattoos everywhere as well as body piercings, not to mention the ever popular nips, tucks, face lifts and lip enhancements. It's as though there is a contempt for what we have been given by God and a desire to make it better through permanent procedures. Now in death cremation and liquidfication bring this contempt for the body to a new high. Isn't this just the old fashioned heresy of Dualism: the spiritual is good and lasting, the physical is bad and evil? The body in death is only a shell, what is good is the immortal soul? Certainly that's not what Catholicism teaches. We honor our Christian bodies which were consecrated by Christ in Baptism and made a temple of the Holy Spirit. Just as we should disposed of all things blessed in an appropriate way, how much more the Christian body? The insistence on burial of human cremains in blessed ground or above ground columbaries/crypts in Church discipline is tied to our respect for the human body in death because of its consecration in life.
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