-
December 16, 2019
Father Gerald D. Coleman, PSS
Maison Hullibarger was 18 years old when he committed suicide on Dec. 4, 2018. He was a brother to five siblings, a straight-A student and outstanding athlete and teammate on the football team at Bedford High School in Temperance, Michigan (2014-2018), about 50 miles south of Detroit. His parents, Jeff and Linda, identified him as “just an unbelievable son.” At the time of his death, he was a freshman studying criminal justice at the University of Toledo.
His funeral Mass took place on Dec. 8 at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. His parents, devout Catholics, met beforehand with Father Don La Cuesta to plan the funeral. They wanted him to celebrate how Maison lived, rather than how he died.
La Cuesta grew up in the Philippines but was educated for the priesthood at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. He chose to ignore the hopes of Maison’s parents by focusing his sermon on suicide, mentioning the word six times. He told the hundreds of mourners that “we must say what we know is the truth that taking your own life is against God who made us,” and “Maison may be denied admittance to heaven because of the way he died (if) he had not repented enough in the eyes of God.”
Maison’s father walked up to the pulpit and whispered, “Father, please stop.” He did not. Maison’s parents were to give brief eulogies before the end of Mass, but La Cuesta singled the organist to begin the final procession. The funeral director stopped the hymn to enable the parents to honor their son in the way they wanted him remembered.
Jeff told the priest he was not welcome at the gravesite and he and his wife led the burial prayers. Linda later said, “Father La Cuesta basically called our son a sinner in front of everyone.” A Detroit archdiocesan spokeswoman apologized and said “an unbearable situation was made even more difficult… We share the family’s grief. Our hope is always to bring comfort into situations of great pain.” Archbishop Allen Vigneron called Maison’s parents to apologize and offered to meet with them.
In the past, Catholic attitudes about suicide were largely based on the teaching that mortal sin is the result of free human will (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1859). Many Catholics assumed that committing suicide automatically condemned a person to hell. After all, the church forebade Catholic funerals and burial in consecrated ground to those who committed suicide. The presumption was that those who commit suicide did so willfully as an affront to God. This practice was not meant to pass judgment on the salvation of one’s soul, but rather a pastoral discipline intended to teach the gravity of suicide.
In recent decades, the church has taken a different approach to suicide with the growing realization that “grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear, or torture can diminish responsibility (and) we should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity of salutary repentance … for persons who have taken their own lives” (Catechism, no. 2283).
St. Paul assures us that our hope for those we love is never misplaced: “Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword separate us from Christ’s love? I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35-39).
The Catholic funeral liturgy contains many symbols of baptism: the sprinkling with holy water, the white pall on the casket reminiscent of the white garment worn at baptism, the Paschal candle lit at Easter and at every baptism and funeral. These are symbols of God’s sacramental entrance into our lives. The Lazarus story in the fourth Gospel teaches us that when confronted with the visible reality of the grave, we need to hear and embrace the message Jesus proclaimed, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
At every funeral liturgy the church must proclaim that each of us is made in God’s image, we are loved more deeply than we can imagine, and death will not ultimately triumph over life. Priests must commit ourselves to make this message clear by what and how we preach, and choosing liturgical colors that express Christian hope, as the Order for Christian Funerals states, no. 39. While violet or black vestments may be worn as options, the OCF lists white vestments as the primary or “most desirable” choice. White is the color of Easter and communicates the joy and hope of the resurrection. Placing skulls and bones on the coffin is an affront to what the church desires to communicate at everyone’s funeral Mass.
Hopefully, no priest will hear what La Cuesta did, “Father, please stop.”
Sulpician Father Gerald D. Coleman is adjunct professor, Graduate Department of Pastoral Ministries, Santa Clara University.