A trans affirming funeral is not a matter of tone. It is a matter of who controls the room, what is said over the body, and whose name is written in the Register of the Dead. This church takes that control seriously and uses it.
If you are in danger tonight, these answer faster than we can, at any hour. Nothing on this page is more important than the four numbers below.
“If someone begins deadnaming the dead at a service we lead, they are stopped. Out loud, in the moment.”
The Office of the Ordinary
On death by suicide
A person who dies by suicide is buried with the full rite and no asterisk. The teaching that withheld burial from the suicided dead caused enormous harm to grieving families and does not hold in this church; the coffin is not marked, the prayers are not shortened, and no one is told their beloved died outside of mercy.
Sometimes a biological family has legal control of the body and uses it: the wrong name on the programme, the wrong pronouns from the pulpit, the partner seated at the back, the chosen family not mentioned at all. That funeral cannot always be stopped, and the Chancery will not pretend it can.
What it does instead is hold a full service for the people who were actually this person’s life — partner, chosen family, friends, the ones who answered the phone at three in the morning. It is not a memorial add-on. It is a trans affirming funeral in the full sense — the Church’s rite, with the correct name spoken and written, and it is entered in the Register of the Dead under that name.
Write to the form on the Ask page or use the form. Deaths are handled ahead of everything else in the Chancery’s queue.
Answered firstThe Ordinary asks early who has legal control of the body, who will be in the room, and who must not be given information about the service.
One service or two, church or graveside or a rented room, readings chosen by the people who loved them, and a decision about who speaks.
The funeral rites of the 1952 Rituale Romanum, unaltered, with the correct name used throughout. Anyone who begins deadnaming is stopped in the moment.
The entry is made in a bound book in ink, under the name they used, and it stays there permanently.
Required — not waivableTheir name, when they died, and who is safe. Anything else can wait.
Write, at any hour. Deaths move to the front of every queue in the Chancery.
Nothing is saved to your name. Press Esc to close.
If you are in danger tonight, these answer faster than we can, at any hour. Nothing on this page is more important than the four numbers below.