Rome, Italy - In the wake of All Souls Day this week, marking the commemoration of the dead, there is growing disagreement between the Italian state and the Roman Catholic Church over whether relatives of those who are cremated should be allowed to scatter their ashes.
In Turin the city council is preparing a new ordinance under which ashes may be scattered at several points along the River Po. Tom Deallesandri, the deputy mayor, said the riverside sites would be chosen "in a matter of weeks", probably beneath the Basilica of Superga at the confluence of the Po and Dora rivers.
La Stampa, the Turin paper, said this posed "no particular health problems". However Cardinal Severino Poletto, the Archbishop of Turin, said it was a dangerous step toward "individualism in prayer and faith." He objected that those who wished to remember the departed would have no memorial at which to pray.
An Italian law passed in 2001 allows either the scattering of ashes or their conservation at home at the discretion of regional health authorities. At present both are permitted in Lombardy, Liguria, Piedmont, Tuscany, Umbria, Emila Romagna, Valle d'Aosta, the Marches, Lazio and Campania.
Cremation was forbidden altogether in the Church for centuries because of the belief that the body is “the temple of the Holy Spirit” and that Christians will be bodily resurrected. The Second Vatican Council lifted the ban in the 1960s, provided the body was present during the funeral and cremated afterwards. Church rules were relaxed further in 1997 when the Vatican agreed that cremated remains could be brought into church for the liturgical rites of burial.
In Italy however many priests remain opposed to cremation on the grounds that it is pagan and pantheistic. Above all there is unease over the practice of scattering ashes in a place which the deceased was fond of in his or her lifetime, in case - as the new rules put it - such wishes were not expressed out of "disdain for Christian belief".
Under new norms due to be adopted next month by the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI) in an extraordinary assembly at Assisi in Umbria, scattering ashes will be prohibited on the grounds that "the kingdom of the dead and the kingdom of the living must remain distinct". Conserving ashes in a place other than a cemetery - for example, at home - will also be banned.
Scattering ashes in the open countryside, the new rules say, "prevents the expression of personal or communal grief with reference to a precise location", making it "more difficult to remember the dead", especially for succeeding generations who did not know the dead person.
At present 53,000 Italians are cremated each year, amounting to 10 per cent of annual deaths, compared to more than 70 per cent in Britain. The figure is expected however to rise to over 200,000, or 35 per cent of annual deaths, according to the Italian Federation of Funeral Directors. There are 45 crematoria, mostly in Northern Italy, and another six are due to come into operation next year.
Observers say the main reason for the increase in cremations is not any change in belief or religious custom, let alone a return to pagan "worship of Mother Earth", but rather the cost of burial in increasingly overcrowded cemeteries. The average cost of a funeral in Italy is nearly 3000 Euros, compared to 500 Euros for a cremation.
Last year there was controversy when a parish priest in the Italian Alps refused to hold a funeral for a local man who had asked to have his remains spread in the mountains. Father Carmelo Pellicone, of the parish of St Etienne in Aosta, told the man’s widow a religious funeral was impossible because it was against the dogma of the resurrection of the body. He was overruled at the time by the Italian Bishops Conference, which said this reflected "an out-of-date mentality".