Of the 7.6 percent of patients in the United States who have survived a full cardiac arrest, 40 percent of them retain some memory of experiences that seem to come from another world, according to research conducted at New York University in 2023. These experiences include voices, ancestors, loved ones, lights, and tunnels. Outside of those experiences, however, faith and imagination must fill in the gaps when we think about life after death.
Early ideas about the afterlife
Christians inherited much of their imagery for the afterlife from the Jewish and Greek cultures within which Christianity developed. Early Christians believed Christ would return quickly and end death forever. When it became clear that many Christians would die before Christ returned, they began developing their own ideas about death and the world beyond the grave. Christian views on the afterlife have evolved since then.
“Hell and heaven haven’t changed for thousands of years, but purgatory is interesting,” says Winston Black, a medieval historian and the Gatto Chair of Christian Studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Outside of academic theology, Black says, ordinary medieval priests and laypeople imagined the afterlife in terms of simple physical or sensory experiences. “Hell is pain or burning, and heaven is delights,” he says.
Purgatory, meanwhile, is a place of discomfort or distress where the dead need the prayers of living Christians. Stories like that of St. Perpetua—a third-century North African Christian who prayed to lessen her brother’s suffering in the afterlife—may reveal some early roots of the belief in purgatory. This “grassroots” concept was eventually codified into Roman Catholic doctrine in 1274 C.E. at the Council of Lyons.
Not quite 50 years later, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote his Divine Comedy, which includes three books: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—or Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Many of our modern-day ideas about heaven and hell come directly from Dante’s imagery. In his book, he describes purgatory as a mountain that penitents must slowly climb as they purify themselves from their sins.
Black says, however, that “purgatory was hell.” Well, like hell. Medieval Christians believed their loved ones were suffering, sometimes at the hands of demons. The difference was that people in purgatory had hope. They could be rescued eventually from their plight.
“If you say hell, what do people imagine?” asks Meghan Henning, an associate professor of Christian Origins at the University of Dayton and author of Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christianity (Yale University Press). “They imagine fire, they imagine torture, and they imagine the devil or a punishing angel.” Henning says these images come directly from Dante’s depiction of hell in Inferno. Dante wrote that a fourth-century text, The Apocalypse of Paul, inspired his vision—and that text was based on one of the earliest recorded “tours of hell,” The Apocalypse of Peter, written in the second century.
In the gospels, Gehenna and Hades are words English Bibles usually translate as “hell.” Gehenna was, originally, a geographic location, a valley southwest of Jerusalem where children were once burned as sacrifices to the god Moloch; later, Gehenna became a place where people dumped their garbage. By Christ’s time, Jews also associated the word with a place in the afterlife where the dead were purified, then released. The Greek word Hades, on the other hand—what the Hebrew scriptures refer to as Sheol—was not necessarily a place of punishment or purification; it was merely the “dwelling place of the dead.”
Another word, Tartarus, also appears in Christian scripture, in 2 Peter, where the author describes the fate of the fallen angels as being cast into Tartarus. According to Greek mythology, Tartarus was a deep abyss used as a dungeon for evildoers.
Henning says early Christian texts sometimes used the imagery of a Roman labor camp to depict hell. Rome often condemned its criminals to labor in the mines, giving Christians imagery of a hot, smelly, underground place ruled by punishing overseers. All these different ideas and places combined to create the Christian concept of hell.
Henning notes that U.S. Christians are more focused on hell than those in other countries. “It’s no coincidence,” she says, “that the nation that has the most interest in hell has the highest rates of incarceration on the planet.”
While North American Christianity has often used the horrors of hell as an impetus to convert, Henning says that early Christian texts on hell were intended to encourage already baptized Christians to live virtuous lives, particularly when it came to care for the community. “There are punishments [in hell] for people who do not live out the Sermon on the Mount,” she says. “Matthew 25 was a big inspiration for the Apocalypse of Peter.”
In the Apocalypse of Paul, Henning says, collecting money for the church and not giving it to the poor is listed as one of the sins punished in hell. She points out that this is quite different from what you’re likely to hear in most American churches. “I’ve never heard anyone preach in a sermon that hell exists, so you should go feed the poor,” she says.
A corporal work of mercy
The last entry on the list of the seven corporal works of mercy is “to bury the dead.” Although six of the corporal works of mercy are based on Matthew 25, the Book of Tobit may be the source of the seventh: “If I saw the dead body of any of my nation thrown out behind the wall of Nineveh, I would bury it” (Tobit 1:17).
Burying the dead wasn’t considered a work of mercy until the Middle Ages. With high mortality rates, particularly for children, most families in medieval Europe had the chance to frequently practice this act. Death was so central to life in the Middle Ages that “manuals” on how to die a Christian death became popular. Most of these books’ contents were aimed at helping people prepare for their own deaths, but the texts also included the proper behaviors, actions, and prayers to be practiced by the deceased’s family and loved ones.
In medieval times, families were responsible for washing the body of the deceased and preparing it for burial; today, those tasks are outsourced to funeral homes. In a 1992 article for the Catholic Worker titled “To Bury the Dead Is a Work of Mercy,” Jennifer Belisle writes, “Burials, unfortunately, have been taken out of the hands of the people, and put into the hands of the market. The only personal sacrifice involved in the modern funeral is the bill and it is often unjustly high.”
Belisle refers to the “God-given rights of family and friends to bury their dead,” and she describes the “family grave” that a Catholic Worker, Michael Kirwan, created on a West Virginia farm. Kirwan, like Tobit, honored people who might otherwise have had no one to care for their bodies one final time in this world.
Changing ideas about death
“Prior to the Civil War,” says the PBS website, describing its Family Undertaking series, “caring for and preparing the dead for burial on family farms or in local cemeteries was both a domestic skill and a family responsibility.” By the end of the 19th century, however, death in America had become a taboo topic to be discussed only in hushed voices. Death no longer usually took place at home, and urbanization and sanitation laws had pushed the graveyard out from the churchyard into secluded, less public spaces. Experts (medical personnel and undertakers) sanitized and veiled the intimate business of death, and America became known as a death-phobic, death-denying, and death-averse society. Meanwhile, the “death industry” expanded exponentially.
The American Way of Death (Vintage), Jessica Mitford’s 1963 landmark exposure of the funeral industry’s exploitative practices, brought death back into American conversations. Mitford’s book revealed that the industry capitalizes on the grief of the bereaved to increase corporate profits. By 2022, those profits had soared to $23 billion annually. Funeral costs in 2024 average $8,300, according to the National Funeral Directors Association (although cremation cuts the cost by about $1,000).
Burial rights
“We need to take concrete steps to reclaim our burial rights,” Belisle says. “First of all, talk about funeral arrangements before someone dies. That way, unwanted services are not forced upon families. Let people die at home, if at all possible. Keep the body at home, laid out by family and friends. Build a simple wooden coffin, or buy one from a cottage industry.”
Today, medieval Christians’ emphasis on a “good death,” is coming back in a new way. The PBS series Family Undertaking describes this growing movement and says that “ ‘hands-on’ care for the dead by family members, including children, can aid in grieving, bring a sense of fulfillment, and help loved ones to grasp the reality of a death.” This trend is reflected in alternative burial options.
Green burial and cremation
In our spread-out world, we have fewer central burial grounds that family members can easily visit. “Cremation has become a solution to that geographic problem,” says Sam Perry, an Illinois funeral director. Cremation is also cheaper than embalming and burial, and Mitford’s exposé of the funeral industry sparked growing interest in this alternative.
For centuries, the Catholic Church had forbidden cremation, but in 1963, the Vatican dropped its prohibition against it. As of last year, more than 60 percent of U.S. death procedures are now cremations, according to the Cremation Association of North America. Although the church still sets regulations around the practice (for example, ashes cannot be scattered but must be kept in one place), cremation is becoming more common among Catholics as well; some estimates indicate that around 20 percent of Catholic burials involve cremation.
Cremation is also better for the Earth. Conventional burials in the United States use about 827,000 gallons of embalming fluid each year; they also use more than 100,000 tons of steel, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, more than 30 million board feet of hardwood, and about 1.6 million tons of concrete. Our planet is bearing the cost of our funeral practices.
Perry, who is also the president of the Green Burial Council, says that what is today known as “green burial” has deep roots in human culture. “This is the more traditional path,” he says, “because it’s what we did before the funeral industry came.”
Green burial requires no embalming fluid, and it uses natural linen shrouds or metal-free wooden coffins, with no cement vaults around the coffin. Cathy Vail, director of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York, says that 44 percent of their burials outside mausoleums are in their green burial section. “In other sections in the cemetery,” Vail says, “there’s a cement box your body or urn is put into—you don’t go back to earth or dust, because you’re in a concrete block. In green burial plots, as time goes on, you go back into the dirt, naturally.” Vail believes environmental concerns more than their faith inspire many Catholics to choose a green burial.
However, Pope Francis’ emphasis on care for our common home can be seen as support for cremation. In 2016, the pope declared care for the Earth as an eighth work of mercy. Burying the dead in a green burial would then be two works of mercy in one.
Green burial is not the same as human composting or other techniques that turn a body into fertilizer, which the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine condemned in a 2023 document. Green burial, advocates say, simply involves the same burial practices used by Christians for some 1800 years.
Community, even in death
In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (On Care for our Common Home), Pope Francis decries the “technocratic paradigm” that treats the most sacred, essential trajectories of human life—birth and death—as opportunities for speculation or profit. The pope says that this paradigm can only “be overcome by the culture of authentic encounter, which involves a radical call to respect and to listen to one another.” Death can be an opportunity for “authentic encounters” to take place.
Medieval Christians—like ancient Christians—believed deeply in death as a communal event. They wanted to be surrounded in prayer as they died, and they named the dead and remembered them in prayers, especially at Mass. As historian Winston Black says, “Christian community is the living and the dead.”
Mary Jo Frick, the president of the Catholic Cemetery Conference and the executive director of the Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Miami, agrees. “Catholic cemeteries are part of our community of faith,” she says, “part of the communion of saints.”
Aileac Deegan, the executive director of Ryan’s Place, a grief ministry for children in Elkhart, Indiana, says that in her native Ireland, death is a family affair. Deegan found great comfort in the tradition, finding it often a joyful occasion. “You’re singing their favorite songs and eating. There’s lots of alcohol and joking as well as crying—it’s all mixed up together,” she says. “Often the priest from the parish will come by the house and stay for a while, be part of that, offer some prayers.”
Deegan also loves the Irish tradition of wicker coffins. It calls to mind, she says, the “Moses baskets” that many Irish children receive after their births: Just as they were brought into this world in baskets, they are also brought into the next.
“Here in the United States,” Deegan says, “most places only give three days bereavement leave.” Ireland, however, has a tradition called “month’s mind,” allowing the community as a whole to respect the prolonged process of grieving. At the end of the month, the parish church holds a requiem Mass; once more, the entire community participates in the process of saying goodbye.
Out of death comes life
The Catholic liturgies and theology around dying give Grace Agolia, a doctoral student in theology at Boston College, a sense of rich meaning, ritual, and comfort. “Some people find walking in cemeteries a bit morbid,” she says, “but I find it very peaceful: a practice of memento mori—remembering the reality of our death.”
Agolia finds liturgical feasts that celebrate the beloved dead, such as All Saints and All Souls Days, particularly comforting. “I have a table where I have all the little cards with people who have died,” she says, “my little communion of saints.” She notes that Catholic liturgies ask us to call to mind members of the community who have died—“who have fallen asleep in Christ”—at every Eucharist.
Agolia is also the editor of the recently released While I Breathe, I Hope: A Mystagogy of Dying (Liturgical Press) by Richard Gaillardetz, a professor of ecclesiology at Boston College who died in November 2023 from cancer. “Rick did not fear death,” Agolia says. “He knew he was enfolded in God’s love.”
As Paul proclaimed, because Christians are buried with Christ in baptism, they share in new life with Christ. “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). The rite of the anointing of the sick, the sacrament of healing for the ill and dying, echoes that scripture, stating: “If they accept their share in the pain of his own passion, they will also share in its power to give comfort and strength.”
“Last rites make the family feel like the person who has died is safe,” says Deegan. “Last rites and absolution are very comforting to people.”
Even so, Agolia acknowledges, “Death can be hard to watch. There’s a point where the person gradually loses consciousness—all they’re doing is breathing. The body is working hard—but at dying.” She remembers the moment Gaillardetz’s breath stopped: “There’s a finality to that: he’s no longer breathing.”
The words that came to Agolia’s mind while watching this process were from Paul’s letter to the Colossians: “His life is hidden with Christ in God.” She describes the moment as deeply sacred and beautiful. At the same time, she says, “It’s heart-breaking. You can’t help but cry.” After Gaillardetz’s breath stopped, Agolia continued to sit with his body; she kept vigil until rigor mortis began to set in. Staying with the body like this, she says, is “the only way to acknowledge the reality of death: that this person has died.”
The funeral liturgies of the Catholic Church, with their emphasis on baptism and life in Christ, affirm the communion of saints, whether in this world or the next—no matter how much Christian views on the afterlife have shifted over the years. Deegan, who works with grieving children, says that Catholic theology gives a concrete reality to a deceased loved one’s continued life. The dead are not simply gone, no longer part of the world in which we live. “We are part of the communion of saints,” says Deegan. That means, she adds, that Christians live, together, in God, forever.
Agolia echoes these sentiments: “Salvation is not an individual reality, it’s a corporate reality—the church celebrates this in the Eucharist—we are all saved together.”
This article also appears in the November 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 11, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Ascent of the Blessed, Hieronymus Bosch, circa 1500, Wikimedia Commons
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