Placing personal mementos like football jerseys or photographs on coffins and playing popular music during funeral services will be discouraged under draft guidelines being considered by the Catholic Church.
The final farewells of Australia's Catholics have become increasingly personalised and irreverent, according to the church's National Liturgical Commission, which wants funeral services to return to their significance as acts of worship.
Parish priests had complained to the commission of inappropriate behaviour, including the telling of blue jokes, of a beer bottle cracked open at the altar, of longwinded eulogies, and one that included a verbal attack on the church.
Pop songs and personal remembrances should be kept for vigils the night before the funeral, for the graveside or even the wake, the commission argues.
The commission's executive officer, Father Peter Williams, said funerals primarily organised as a personal celebration of the lives of the deceased sidelined messages of Christian faith of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the promise of eternal life.
"You've got a collision between the church's rites and people's expectations in memorialising someone important to them who has died," he told the Herald. "The funeral liturgy of the Catholic Church is itself an act of worship, it is ostensibly a liturgy of praise and thanks for God ... it's about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in whom this person was incorporated through their baptism."
The trend to incorporate secular elements into Christian funeral services, Father Williams said, dated to the 1997 funeral of Princess Diana, which departed from traditional Christian liturgies.
A commission subcommittee is reviewing guidelines for funeral services and will be taking its recommendations to Catholic bishops early next year. It would then be up to each bishop to issue his own set of directives.
The guidelines are likely to suggest objects of personal remembrance including photos, fishing reels, jerseys and even knitting needles be placed on a memorial table near the coffin.
"We're not saying there is no place for these items, that things should be bland and impersonal; what we are saying is that there should be a balance," Father Williams said.
"In one instance, somebody was giving a eulogy at a funeral and brought a stubby of beer up to the lectern, undid the top and started to drink it. To take those sorts of liberties when people are very raw and grief-stricken, I think, does extend the boundaries of propriety."
Far from tightening provisions for funeral services, the Uniting Church's new order of service, to be released later this year, will maintain the discretion of ministers to personalise funeral services as they see fit.
Mike Bromilow, the spokesman for the head of the Anglican Church in Australia, Archbishop Peter Carnley, said there was some scope to include music and readings that held special meaning, if they were in keeping with the spirit of the occasion.
"But there wouldn't be too many members of the clergy who'd support the playing of heavy metal music," he said.