Fr Krupp on Eulogies

It might be the time for the Eulogy talk at Catholic funerals.

To be clear at my parishes, I ask people to not you do eulogies. 

If they fight me, I let them win. 

Fighting with people in grief never ends well. 

With that, here’s some thoughts on eulogies at Catholic funerals. 

First of all, there is a cultural problem with most eulogies. Catholics don’t do funerals to honor the dead, though many Americans do. 

Catholics do funerals for two reasons: 

1. To pray for the soul of the deceased.

2. To ask God to strengthen our hope in the resurrection.

The dead are usually honored during the mass, but that is not the goal. The goal is to raise peoples hope in Jesus, not in the good life of a human.

To be blunt, humans cannot earn heaven, but many eulogies unintentionally tell people they can.

A great way to think about it is this: a person doesn’t go to heaven because they do good things, but people who are going to heaven do good things. That might sound minor, but theologically there’s a huge difference between those 2 ideas.

Beyond that, with more and more Americans being unchurched, more and more people walk into church with no clue how to act and nothing shows it more than what people say at eulogies, what they talk about and what they value in the deceased person. 

It’s really, really hard to offend me, but most of the times that it happens is at eulogies. 

To be clear, I don’t act offended, people don’t mean to be offensive, but it pierces the heart to hear some of the things people say about the dead while they are standing in a Sacred place doing a Sacred thing.

Finally & frankly, most people are not good public speakers. 

I’m a good public speaker, but I work very, very hard at it. I spend at least an hour a day working on my homily for Sunday. 

Even with that, it’s tough.

Most eulogies are frankly not well done. They’re overly long, with a lot of mumbling, or with folks doing a kind of public therapy while standing up there.

Part of being a good public speaker is being aware of time. 

The funeral ritual itself is about 50 minutes. Funerals with eulogies tend to be about 80 minutes. 

This is not an exaggeration.

If you’re not a public speaker, and the priest tells you that the eulogy should not be more than four minutes, most people intend to comply with that. They simply have no idea how much content that is. 

So, they get up and they talk and they talk and the schedule (which is always tight for a priest, Church & funeral home) ends up unnecessarily blown up. 

Eulogies can be a lovely thing, but it is my opinion that they are best done at funeral homes or gravesides, not in a Catholic Church.

Thus endeth my lecture.