In this episode of The John Henry Weston Show, we speak with Antonia Cummings, a Catholic Funeral Director who is a graduate of Christendom College and was able to provide us with firsthand accounts of massive blood clots found in the bodies of victims post-vaccination. In addition, she is able to corroborate, as a funeral director, the massive spike in miscarriages during the rollout of the "cocktail" vaccine.
00:01:01.840But for a long time, we couldn't, until now.
00:01:05.800We've been able to get to a funeral director that we know, who is faithful,
00:01:10.900who is actually a graduate of Christendom College, and she was able to corroborate this for us.
00:01:18.700These blood clots, massive blood clots that are going on in being seen in cadavers post-vaccination, etc.
00:01:28.020In addition, she was able to corroborate, as a funeral director, the massive spike in miscarriages during the rollout of the vaccine.
00:01:38.980In addition, Antonia Cummings, the funeral director, is going to talk to us about how to deal properly with burial, burial of your loved ones.
00:01:51.000And in today's day and age, you have a lot of people who, their children aren't practicing faith anymore, don't want to even have a funeral, don't want to have a proper burial.
00:02:06.260Finally, a situation that I've sadly experienced myself, is where a hospital, after a miscarriage, won't give you the body of your baby back for burial.
00:02:16.640They say, no, no, no, it's hazardous biomedical waste, as a doctor, no kidding, told my wife.
00:02:22.940And we had to fight to get the body of our baby back for burial.
00:02:26.220So, this is an amazing show, because Antonia Cummings, funeral director, faithful Catholic, is going to share all of that with us, and more.
00:02:36.620Stay tuned for this episode of The John Henry Weston Show.
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00:03:42.940So, Antonia, a young lady like yourself, involved in this business, what many people would call macabre, what in the world got you into being a funeral director?
00:03:55.100So, I originally had never had any intention of becoming a funeral director.
00:04:01.700I was actually looking into becoming a registered nurse while getting my theology degree at Christendom College.
00:04:07.340And it was my sophomore year where I had the experience of losing two friends in my age group.
00:04:15.080They weren't Christendom students, but we had worked together through high school and had remained close.
00:04:21.220They would even come visit me on campus sometimes.
00:04:23.240And they were both very sudden deaths, things that are true acts of God, not really understandable in the moment.
00:04:32.720But their deaths really impacted me in a good way because attending their funerals is really where I felt a calling to become a funeral director.
00:04:42.200And it's really the only time in my life where I can honestly say I felt like I heard the Holy Spirit.
00:04:47.280People will say they feel like they hear the Holy Spirit talk to them.
00:04:50.960And I always kind of wondered what that would be like.
00:04:52.800But it was just extremely clear to me that that's what I was called to do.
00:04:57.260So I was very blessed to actually get to ask the funeral director who took care of my friends if I could shadow him.
00:05:06.020And he was kind enough to let me do that and really made me understand that this is not just a job.
00:05:13.200It's a ministry and a way of life and that it was going to be hard.
00:05:18.080But if I loved it and really loved the people I'd be taking care of, that it would be very rewarding.
00:05:23.360And he was right about all those things.
00:05:25.780So I've been in the funeral business now for about eight years or ministry, as I call it.
00:05:32.840And I never looked back from sophomore year of college with this as my goal.
00:05:37.780So I graduated and 10 days later was in mortuary school.
00:05:41.940And people say you can't use your theology degree in the world.
00:05:45.100But it actually transferred right into mortuary school and actually cut a whole year off of my education.
00:05:51.680So it made the process very simple and I use it every day.
00:05:55.280So I'm very thankful to have that liberal arts background with theology being the main focus and applying that to funeral directing today.
00:06:45.700The actual church teaching is that it is allowed, but it is not the preferred method for final disposition.
00:06:53.000And the reasons behind it not being preferred method of final disposition are some people might say immediately, oh, like, because it's a pagan practice or because it's not something that happened to Christ himself.
00:07:10.380And those are true things, that those are traditional aspects of why we don't prefer cremation.
00:07:17.020But there are actually a lot of other reasons why the church in its wisdom specifically says it's the second of the two options, essentially.
00:07:25.760And I've come into contact with those reasons in a very intimate way many times being in the career I'm in.
00:07:34.420So I'd be happy to kind of go over some of those things with you if you like.
00:07:38.100Okay, so one of the things about cremation that is often disputed is that, okay, it's green, according to the public, or more affordable.
00:07:52.140And really, as studies have been coming out more and more, it's really not as good for the environment as people are saying, which is, of course, shocking, right?
00:08:01.240I mean, why would we not be excited about tons of heat being put out into the world right now when people are arguing that global warming is such an issue?
00:08:10.760It produces a lot of heat, and it really is not as affordable as people may think it is initially, because it's starting to go up in price as more and more people select cremation to off-site costs that funeral homes incur no matter what, cremation is going to continue to go up.
00:08:29.780So it'll eventually end up being the same price as burial.
00:08:32.500So the church, in its wisdom, says that if you are cremated, that you should be permanently placed in a grave somewhere, not only so that people can remember to pray for the dead and visit their loved ones,
00:08:47.140but it's actually very practical because a lot of people, when they choose cremation, it's very easy to go through the grieving process and then just kind of step away from the situation and just separate yourself completely from the loss.
00:09:02.600A lot of people aren't handling their grief very well these days, probably from a lack of connection to our Lord and their faith and just hope in general, but also it's just really easy with cremation.
00:09:16.040And you can have the cremation take place, and maybe you don't have the money yet for the cemetery property, so it's easy to just leave your loved one's ashes at the funeral home for an indefinite period of time.
00:09:26.840So my experience is that we have shelves upon shelves and cages and safes full of urns that sometimes people don't claim for years.
00:09:37.680And a lot of the time, we can't get a hold of family after a certain period of time, and we're stuck with many unclaimed people.
00:09:46.040So I think it's very amazing that the church prudently understands that it would be very easy for people to just forget about their loved ones after they're cremated and leave them behind.
00:09:57.820And eventually, too, people who end up taking their urn home but never end up buying a cemetery plot, what ends up happening is they have multiple family members that have been in their homes, and they pass away themselves.
00:10:14.460And the grandchildren don't remember grandma and grandpa or aunt and uncle so-and-so, and they don't know what to do with these urns.
00:10:21.640So a lot of times when the estate sale happens or the storage unit gets cleaned out, those urns end up in a landfill.
00:10:30.060So I've actually been part of some funeral director projects where we've actually been able to recover some urns from landfills.
00:10:39.240But it's really very sad, this entire generation of people that have essentially been lost because they're not placed somewhere that is dignified or a place to honor their genealogy and their family heritage.
00:10:53.680And it's just sad to see that people are not respecting the dead the way they used to.
00:10:59.320And I think cremation, that makes it just so simple to not have to think about it or respect the dead.
00:11:07.040So one of the other issues that you deal with is something that impacted my life.
00:11:15.420Today, many hospitals that you would go to for help when you're having a pregnancy or miscarriage, the doctors, some of them abortionists, or at least they perform abortions.
00:11:29.320They don't regard the child in the womb as a child.
00:11:33.060So my wife was in the situation where we had a child who was lost in miscarriage and she asked the doctor for the body of the baby and he refused.
00:11:43.400He says, it's a biomedical waste and, you know, it's hazardous.
00:12:48.600Because he was worried that they were just going to take the baby off and not give the baby back.
00:12:53.740So I ended up being able to help them get all the necessary documentation to be able to have their baby buried at a cemetery because you need, it's not considered a death certificate when a baby passes away.
00:13:07.680If they have not taken a breath, it's considered a fetal demise certificate.
00:13:11.580And in these cases, a lot of the times doctors are unwilling to fill those out because they're not willing to state that this is indeed a baby that deserves to have rights of burial.
00:13:22.500So I'm able to, at least in Virginia and D.C., do what's called a manual fetal death certificate and get that filed with the local health department and be able to make it so that these families can bury their babies in a public cemetery.
00:13:40.080I've gone up to bat for a number of families with hospitals that are withholding a baby from the family and been able to get the necessary release to go and take these babies into my care.
00:13:50.940I've gone into the delivery room and taken the baby myself if that made the hospital more comfortable with the situation.
00:13:58.160It really just depends on the hospital and the staff member at the time, essentially.
00:14:03.240But it is perfectly legal to take your baby's remains home and do whatever it is that you would like to do because since there's no death certificate, a lot of the legal process is not as difficult as if they had taken a breath and then you have to go through a death certificate process through a funeral home.
00:14:23.420So one of my ministries that I like to do a lot is to help families figure out what they can do or what they can afford for their baby to be buried.
00:14:33.560You can have your baby buried in your own yard, at a church property.
00:14:39.640There just aren't as many legal issues with burying a baby that has a fetal certificate versus a death certificate.
00:14:47.280So that's something that priests reach out to me all the time for families who are at hospitals going through these battles.
00:14:53.840Now, you give talks at seminaries for priests to be able to understand what it is they need to know.
00:15:03.680What what do you cover there with them?
00:15:07.220So I was recently able to go to St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, which was an amazing experience.
00:15:13.520They have 14 seminaries that are being ordained this year and the rector was kind enough to have me.
00:15:19.720So what I did was I put together a book for them with terminology that they're going to find useful when they come into contact with families who've either already experienced a loss or they've been called to give last rights to someone.
00:15:34.020And I wanted them to have that terminology just because they're going to run into a lot of things that maybe they haven't heard about, like water cremation or heat cremation or a graveliner or caskets, whatever it is that they're going to have to have people asking them questions about.
00:15:49.420And I just thought it would be helpful for them to be familiar with that.
00:15:51.840And then I specifically put together for them the Catholic version, so to speak, of cremation, where if you are going to have cremation, here are some things you can do to make it a little bit more in line with the church's teachings, such as having a wake so that people have an opportunity to acknowledge a death, acknowledge mortality, be able to see their loved one one last time in the image of God,
00:16:19.900even if it's not with the likeness because the soul has left the body, because I do believe that's very important for people, especially as part of the grieving process, to actually identify someone that does not look like themselves as they remember,
00:16:34.100but actually identify that there is something inherently different about them after they've passed away and their soul has left their body,
00:16:39.940and to be able to start healing in a way that's healthy and take those steps in grief.
00:16:47.220A lot of people just don't know that if you have cremation, you can still have a wake with a body present, and a lot of funeral homes offer what's called a rental casket,
00:17:01.760so you're able to do that fairly affordably, and then have the funeral mass with the body in the casket present.
00:17:10.480A lot of Catholics don't realize that a funeral mass is only able to be said one time, and the body has to be present,
00:17:17.940and while you can't have a funeral mass with an urn, you're not able to have the pall placed on an urn,
00:17:23.960which is the unified symbol of baptism for all baptized Christians, and because an urn is not the image of God,
00:17:32.960it's an urn with ashes in it, you cannot have a pall on an urn, you can only have a pall on a casket with a full body present.
00:17:41.140So I encourage a lot of Catholics to do that, and then of course the cremation will have to take place,
00:17:47.140so you're not going to have a burial right away, but at least you'll have been able to have that closure from a wake,
00:17:54.240and then a funeral mass with the body present, and then down the road, hopefully within a week at the most,
00:18:00.200have an internment with a priest present to bless the grave and give the final committal service.
00:18:07.500So I broke down all the different variations of cremation, like best to worst essentially for them,
00:18:14.960and gave them a rundown of what all of that is, and then I went on to address burial rites with a casket,
00:18:23.460and how they're going to come across a lot of families that are going to say that they're not Catholic anymore,
00:18:30.000and so they really don't need to remember their loved one one last time in a way that just isn't settling,
00:18:35.780that they don't want to have a funeral mass because it will be uncomfortable for them to have to go
00:18:41.020and stay behind while everyone else goes to communion, or whatever the issue is for them.
00:18:48.600And I just encourage these priests to remember that not only are we fighting for the soul of the person who's passed away,
00:18:54.220just like we fight for the unborn children, we are fighting for the souls of people who no longer can speak,
00:19:00.380because practicing Catholics deserve to have those funeral rites and those opportunities for people to pray for them.
00:19:07.620But something that I think we neglect to think about is that this is an opportunity to really evangelize people.
00:19:14.160Even though we live in a culture of death, we don't really meditate on death very much for ourselves.
00:19:21.260We don't meditate on our mortality and meditate on end things.
00:19:25.800It's just much easier to sweep all of this under the carpet and focus on celebrations of life and parties
00:19:32.480and things that are kind of flash in the pan fixes for the grief that we're feeling.
00:19:38.100I'm all for a good Irish Catholic wake.
00:19:41.700You can have a big party and have a great time.
00:19:45.320I mean, I encourage in-home wakes with people having glasses of wine and toasting the person that's passed on.
00:19:53.880But there's that element of facing the death head on.
00:19:57.940You're celebrating their life, but you're acknowledging mortality and you're preparing for the holy rite of a funeral mass.
00:20:04.820And it's just much more full circle wholesome than maybe a celebration of life would be.
00:20:09.720I think that sometimes as Catholics, we can maybe think it's all rigid and there's no joy in this.
00:20:17.720But for me, funerals are incredibly joyful.
00:20:21.200And the rigidity, as they call it, is really in order to help start the healing process.
00:20:28.740And something that we've all seen is mental illness on the rise since COVID.
00:20:34.260And especially in the funeral ministry, I've seen a lot of people really suffering with mental illnesses,
00:20:40.480not only from the seclusion that COVID produced, but truly an illness of just grief sickness.
00:20:50.520Years later, they're still facing this sense of loss.
00:20:54.460Maybe they didn't get to say goodbye because their loved one died in the hospital alone, going through all this guilt.
00:20:59.900They didn't get the support they needed from friends and family after the loss.
00:21:04.400And they're still, to this day, just not able to cope.
00:21:08.620I unfortunately have recently had a couple of people who lost someone in 2020 and actually just lost their own lives from their own hands,
00:21:19.260from just still not being able to cope from the grief.
00:21:21.320So, the unspoken deaths that COVID took are, so many of them are just truly depression and all the other things that came from COVID.
00:21:34.460So, I'm a very strong believer in the church's teachings for Catholic funeral rites.
00:21:39.920People like to say all the time that the Catholic church is not in line with science.
00:21:43.820I beg to disagree because the science shows that people need a grieving process and they need order.
00:21:51.940And that's proven in all kinds of scientific studies.
00:21:56.460So, I think it's pretty amazing that we have this series of funeral rites, a wake, a funeral mass, a committal, and maybe a reception or some kind of a celebration.
00:22:06.280But all of those things are in line with a true good step process for healing after a grief.
00:22:14.920So, those are some things I covered with seminarians.
00:22:19.700I went on to all the different ways they can save money with burial, especially.
00:22:26.240How to put together your own family cemetery if you can't afford to buy property at a public cemetery.
00:22:32.520There are just so many resources to make this affordable.
00:22:36.460It's just a matter of facing the issue of mortality and being willing to have those conversations as a family and how to make that work for you.
00:22:46.000One of those issues that you mentioned is very severe today.
00:22:48.940Because there are, unfortunately, a lot of young people, middle-aged people, whatever, who no longer practice faith and don't see the value, as they might say, in terms of a funeral.
00:23:05.040Oh, it costs money and we can just, you know, burn the body, get rid of it and not worry about it.
00:23:48.580They just decided they didn't want to do it.
00:23:50.620So they broke it all down to a direct cremation.
00:23:55.460So that really made me start thinking, like, what can we do to help protect Catholic families from this situation?
00:24:02.140And what I ended up deciding to do is to go back to school, essentially, and become a not only licensed funeral director, but also licensed insurance agent and start working with an estate lawyer to learn what we could do to ensure this would happen for Catholic families.
00:24:20.160So depending on the area of the country that you're in, there might be some variations.
00:24:26.360But in Virginia and D.C., if you pre-arrange for your funeral services and you've prepaid them, you have an option to make them irrevocable, which means that the money that you've put in has no cash value.
00:24:41.680So there really is no reason not to have the services because the money is either going to be used or it's not.
00:24:49.900So that's kind of a very simple fix to the issue.
00:24:55.520Another one is that you can actually put together in your will a designation form where people have designated someone who's not maybe a family member, maybe someone who you trust, like a friend.
00:25:10.740We can't choose our family, but you can choose your friends or even a lawyer if you don't have a good friend group that's young enough to be able to handle these things for you.
00:25:18.620But what I do is I put together these designation forms along with an estate planning lawyer to have someone in place to essentially act as a morality trustee to make sure that these things happen.
00:25:31.080And designation forms are specifically just for rights of disposition, kind of like a medical power of attorney is just for your medical power to be able to make decisions on your behalf if you're ill or financial power of attorney on behalf of your finances.
00:25:45.840So a designation form is a really simple and inexpensive fix for that.
00:26:39.940And Mamma great Dave and if you're finding it even more important at this position, yet, you know what yourself.
00:26:44.940Of course, some states are contesting morality clauses for different things, but I would hope that at least for morality clauses in regards to your final disposition rights, that those will continue to be protected for now.
00:26:57.120So that's something that I'm specifically working on with families is prearranging your funeral services and getting them in connection with a good Catholic estate planning lawyer and making sure they have a designee that is a practicing Catholic or at least someone who really truly is there for them to value what they want, regardless of their own beliefs.
00:27:21.660Hmm. It's hard to have to talk about these things, but it's obviously a reality that is affecting people nowadays.
00:27:30.060I wanted to ask you, too, about your work during COVID. What happened during COVID as a funeral director? What did you see going?
00:27:39.960Yeah, that's a great question. So when COVID first came on the scene, or at least on our scene in the East Coast in March of 2020, we didn't really know what to expect like everyone else.
00:27:54.780So we were kind of all hands on deck ready to go. We, at least in Virginia and D.C. area, we had a couple of spikes, so to speak, but we didn't have the floodgates that some people talked about in New York and California.
00:28:10.580Um, so it was kind of an interesting experience because people would be asking me regularly, like, are you just swamped? Like, what's going on over there? Um, but once we found out that COVID wasn't transmittable from a deceased person, which was pretty early on, um, I wasn't really completely sure why we were as concerned as we were sometimes.
00:28:31.060Um, I'm blessed to work for a company that, um, does not require the vaccine. They were, um, once they knew that masks weren't that helpful, um, they didn't really uphold that. So I really had the best experience I possibly could as far as COVID goes in the workplace. Um, but really March of 2020, August of 2020, um, I don't want to speak wrong here,
00:28:59.460but I think there were only two other months in 2021 where we had a so-called spike, but to be completely honest, um, the spikes that we saw in death numbers, if you track them and what they were and categorize them, yes, we had some people that were, um, supposedly COVID deaths. I had a number of those, um, where the family said my, I was never told my loved one had COVID.
00:29:22.620And I went back to the doctors and I went back to the doctors and asked about that. And a couple of them changed the cause of death for me to whatever it actually was. So I was, I was very blessed in that area as well. I had a number of families that I was able to do that for, I think at least six. And then, um, some of them just brushed it off and said, well, maybe they did. I don't know. They were in a nursing home. So it's quite possible, but we had, we did have those experiences.
00:29:48.620And then, um, the spikes in the deaths, if you looked at them and we looked at all the causes of death, because we do send in a report to the health department at the end of every month with those. And you look at that report, the spikes were, um, miscarriages, heart attacks. Um, we did have a lot of pneumonia cases and, um, random people who committed suicide.
00:30:15.620So the spikes weren't actually the deaths that we would have thought were causing the spike. So the spike months we had were just a giant hodgepodge of other things. They weren't just COVID deaths. So that was interesting. And, um, I actually talked to some of my colleagues about that. Like, what do you, what do you think about that? Isn't it strange that we've had.
00:30:37.620Dozens of babies pass away recently. And even they couldn't deny that instead, like, yeah, this is really weird. Like we've been funeral directors for almost 30 years, never seen a month like this, where we've had almost a baby for each day of the month. Like that was a reality for a couple months in 2020 and 2021. It's definitely slowed down.
00:30:59.560Um, but the spike months we had, um, but the spike months we had, had lots of heart attacks, lots of strokes, lots of pneumonia and lots of miscarriages. So I don't think that one of the things I meant to, I meant to ask you was, and I don't know if you've been involved directly in this, but during this whole thing, particularly as the vaccinations got going, there were reports from embalmers all over the place regarding clotting.
00:31:26.660I don't know if you came across any of that.
00:31:31.220Yeah, no, I had a lot of people come up to me about that as well. So I, I am a licensed embalmer. Um, I kind of transitioned away from that in 2019. So unfortunately I wasn't a heavily involved in that side of things. Um, a couple of my colleagues who are kind of on the same page as me, I went to them and asked them, what are you seeing? Like what's going on? And they were very frank with me that
00:31:56.660Normally when you embalm someone, you only have to have the head and the feet at a slight angle, feet being maybe five inches lower than where the head is at on the embalming table.
00:32:09.380And that's for natural reasons, gravity to be able to let water and everything that we're doing to cleanse the body, go down into a drain. And, um, one person specifically told me that they actually had to almost stand a person up, like buckle them into the table and almost stand them up just to get cloths out.
00:32:30.980And that they thought that was very unusual. And we are on the same page on most things. So I ended up going to another source for another funeral director that I'm close with, but we're not necessarily on the same page with things. And they also said that they'd had very odd clots and that, um, they were all kinds of textures that we weren't used to. And I, I was an embalmer for four years.
00:32:54.880So I was able to really discuss with them, like, well, were they sinewy? Were they like coffee grounds? Were they really long? And we were kind of, um, just having a, a trade conversation about like, yeah, remember the time we had, I had one that came out that was three inches long and they were saying, oh no, like I'm having 12 inch long clots.
00:33:15.240So we were kind of just having a trade conversation. Like we would have had when I was an embalmer and kind of asking for tips and tricks essentially. And they were saying, no, there, there is something different about the issues that I'm dealing with. So I can't say I've seen it firsthand, but I was able to go to people that I trust and ask them on what their experiences have been when people were asking me about it.
00:33:38.840Hmm. That's amazing. Corroboratory evidence for us. Cause that's, it's one of the things, I mean, you see everything on the internet and you're like, he looks beautiful. I don't know what to believe anymore. You know, cause there's so much doubt out there. So thank you. Thank you for that. Um, is there something you can tell us? I don't know if you, you know it at all, but have you experienced, uh, a difference from a, a funeral done in a more traditional sort of, uh, right?
00:34:08.180Traditional Catholic right versus a Nova sort of right. Have you noticed any differences that way?
00:34:14.260That is a great question. Um, so I've had the honor of doing two pretty incredible traditional Latin right funerals that, I mean, I was really excited about them because from beginning to end, they were everything that I would ever want my own funeral to be. They had an in-home wake. Um, they had zoned their property for a burial on their property, which I was able to help them get someone to clear
00:34:38.180out the property and get someone from the health department to come out and zone the property so they could be buried there. Um, they had a beautiful black Paul. They had all black vestments. They had a beautiful, um, school. Uh, everything was just beautiful. And it was a very emotional thing for me. And I would think it was an emotional thing for other people, um, to be there because it was just so beautiful. Um, it was an all night wake candle lit. People were having wine. Um, there was the sense of
00:35:08.020true reverence for the person who passed away. Um, but also just this sense of really celebrating who they were, their legacy that they left behind that the person had actually, um, had a conversion on their deathbed. So it was a really neat thing for the family because they really wanted this for them. And they actually converted right before they passed away and had last rights. So, um, it was just, it was, it really was like a true celebration. Um, and then this,
00:35:37.800it's beautiful reverence for the mortality and, um, the rights that we've been known for as Christians since Christ died because before we were known as Christians, we were known as a burial society. So this really is a keystone of our faith that we really have to protect. So seeing the Latin right is always amazing and I do love it and it's beautiful.
00:35:57.740And I also had the honor of taking care of two children who passed away very tragically. And they were able to receive not only the Latin right, but the Latin right of the Holy Innocence, which is a whole superpower mass in itself. Um, so being involved in that and seeing that was really in some ways, just kind of a historical moment because it was kind of at the cusp of things, maybe, um, becoming more.
00:36:23.740More unavailable, I guess is the best way of putting it. Um, but I do think that the Latin mass has a intrinsic power that is palpable and, um, it's beautiful and it's ordered.
00:36:39.740And those are all things that are slowly becoming more and more difficult to come into contact with in our society. So absolutely the Latin mass is in many ways more powerful for a funeral right than any other. And I'm sure that it has spiritual effects for the soul of the person who's passed away, protecting them from any kind of, um, demonic presences amongst, um, their fight essentially for, to leave purgatory and enter heaven.
00:37:07.380And so I think that that's a beautiful opportunity if anyone can do that for their loved one. Um, as far as the Novus Ordo mass goes, um, it really depends on the priest and the congregation.
00:37:18.680I mean, I've seen some funeral masses that are just really sad because nobody goes up to communion and the priest kind of, it's just awkwardly standing there waiting to see what's going to happen.
00:37:31.800And the eulogies are a little shaky, which there's nothing wrong with not necessarily knowing what to say when someone's passed. That's a normal reaction, but just this kind of timidity of mortality, it's like people just don't want to face anything about it.
00:37:48.060So it can be very sad because a lot of times the Novus Ordo mass, um, I found a lot of people are not necessarily as, um, ardent in their belief of the resurrection and their, their feelings of hope.
00:38:00.360So, um, I don't want to dissuade people from a Novus Ordo funeral mass because I've definitely had them where the families are very ardent and the priest gives an incredible homily.
00:38:12.100And the organist and the soloist do a beautiful job and those experiences do happen.
00:38:18.760I think that the key to that is, um, while we're in a time where maybe we can't have a Latin rite funeral mass as commonly as we can, the Novus Ordo, um, I think participation as lay people can make all the difference.
00:38:33.540Um, the corporal work of mercy of bearing the dead and spiritual work of mercy of praying for the dead, um, go hand in hand.
00:38:41.080When you attend a funeral mass and maybe you of course are there present praying for the deceased, but you can act as a pallbearer.
00:38:49.080Um, little baby girls can throw flower petals in front of the casket as they walk to the graveside to participate at a young age and learning how to pray and participate in burying the dead.
00:39:00.680Um, you can have people singing as you process out of the church to the hearse and then at the cemetery site.
00:39:06.900I encourage families to write letters to their loved one, maybe forgiving them for something that they've been harboring some kind of angst against them or just saying how much they're going to miss them at whatever event they were looking forward to, um, being present with them and putting that in the casket with them or cremating it with them or whatever it is they're doing.
00:39:25.900Um, and just kind of, um, releasing any soul ties that they have that are negative with the person, but also strengthening the ones that are good.
00:39:34.640So I think participation of the lay people in funeral rights is really what's missing and what's going to help reawaken, um, Catholic funeral rights, which really need to make a comeback.
00:39:48.260Um, if I ever got a chance to talk to Pope Francis about something, that would definitely be the first thing I talked about because I think that if we can change, um, the culture of death to a culture of life, I think that facing mortality in a healthy way is really where we need to start because then we'll be able to identify what life is and the value of life and be able to live it well.
00:40:10.140So that we can be able to live it well so that we can be able to live it well so that we can die well.
00:40:13.080You know, one last thing I wanted to ask you about, and that was just the, the idea you, you had mentioned there, the, um, that the Christians were known as the burial people, uh, explain that a little bit more, but also the, the concept of sacred ground.
00:40:29.800Yeah. So, um, historically, um, it was unusual when Christ died to be buried, um, mainly because it was,
00:40:40.140it was expensive. Not everyone could afford a cave. And the reality is that, um, burying deep enough was very difficult because, um, the ground is hard there. It's, it didn't have the proper equipment and burying meant that they had to make sure that animals weren't going to get to their loved ones' bodies. That's just practical information.
00:41:00.500And so the Romans and other people, um, that weren't Christian or Jewish at the time were doing other things like water burial or, um, pyres or other things.
00:41:12.340So it became very well known that these crazy people were always burying their dead, no matter what it meant that they had to do to make it happen.
00:41:21.540And so they became known as a burial society before they became known as followers of Christ, because that's what people identified them as was these people that always buried their dead.
00:41:31.260And that they had, um, um, some traditions that came with them from their Jewish backgrounds and they followed some rights of the old Testament, but they were incorporating this, um, hope that Christ had brought from the resurrection and burying their dead and, um, assuming that there would be a resurrection and that this wasn't the end and respecting their dead in a way that made their bodies sacred.
00:41:55.540So they, um, so they, um, um, they, um, became well known for that.
00:41:59.400And as far as, um, sacred ground goes, um, of course it is preferable to be able to be buried in a Catholic cemetery that has been blessed and consecrated.
00:42:12.720Unfortunately, a lot of dioceses either have their cemeteries completely full or there just simply isn't one.
00:42:18.980Um, so a lot of cemeteries nowadays have a Catholic section, which as long as the cemetery is not designated under a particular title that would go against our teachings completely, like, um, just as an example, maybe a Wiccan cemetery that's specifically dedicated to nature or something like that.
00:42:39.260There's no reason why you can't be buried in a cemetery, um, that has a Catholic section, or you can have your plot or grave specifically dedicated, um, to Christ by a priest.
00:42:53.040So, um, I do have options for families for that, but my personal favorite option for consecrated ground, if you don't have a diocesan Catholic cemetery is to maybe go in with a family and continue that tradition of being a burial society.
00:43:08.700And buying a piece of land in a rural area and having it deeded as a private non-profit cemetery where you and maybe five other families, um, put together a family cemetery.
00:43:20.140And that's not very hard to do if you're in a rural area or have access to a rural area within an hour or so.
00:43:26.900Um, you simply would buy the property, go to your local health department and deed it as a private non-profit cemetery, um, make sure all the family's names are on there.
00:43:36.120Um, and one acre of land will easily allow for up to 250 people to be buried there.
00:43:43.140A lot of acres of land, at least in this area, um, one acre of land could be $13,000, not too far from Northern Virginia.
00:43:51.480Um, one plot in Northern Virginia is $13,000 typically at the least.
00:43:56.960So you could bury 250 people, um, or you could bury one.
00:44:01.560And, um, and that to me is a huge difference.
00:44:04.600So burial could be very affordable with conversations being had with family and, um, getting that land consecrated by a priest.
00:44:12.780Um, and hopefully that land would be there as a symbol of our Christian burial practices, but also for the genealogy of families to be able to remember and honor the people that came before them and remember their heritage as people that thought this was important enough to bury their loved ones.
00:44:31.980And hopefully be assigned to them to continue to honor their dead as they begin their own family.
00:44:37.260So I think if we, um, start having these conversations, even with children and make it a normal practice to bring your children to wakes and funerals and talk about mortality and the value of life, that these things will slowly become more important.
00:44:53.760Um, and I truly believe that cremation is going to go down.
00:44:57.180Um, I think that COVID was the step towards that, um, because a lot of people have realized that scientifically we identify shapes as humans, babies learn to see squares and circles and triangles, and they can identify them.
00:45:12.960And we, and we, and we, as adults, we identify shapes of people and objects and different things and identify them.
00:45:18.920But when you haven't seen your parent in months, and then you're not allowed to say goodbye to them dying in hospital, and then you're handed their urn, identifying that that is your parent is very difficult because you can't associate that that shape is your parent.
00:45:34.940It's just not the way our brains are wired.
00:45:37.200And so I think that as we've suffered so much loss, um, because we weren't allowed to be with them or whatever the case was, we're going to start seeing a decline in cremation.
00:45:49.500And I've seen a lot of Catholics already start to identify that this is an issue, and I'm hoping it'll continue to go that way.
00:45:56.620So bringing back the beauty of the Catholic funeral rites, I think will really help with the culture of death, becoming a culture of life and, um, the healing process in America.
00:46:08.380Antonia Cummings, thank you for this very different ministry that I don't think many people would think of as a ministry, particularly not for young Catholic women like yourself.
00:46:21.780And, uh, amazing the love and care you show for the, you know, taking care of everyone's loved ones, uh, in their final journey.