Funerals

Dear friend,

We offer you our prayers and support at this time of your loss.  As you consider funeral arrangements, this guide will help you plan the Liturgy. You are invited to choose scriptures, music and prayers, as well as family members and friends to participate at various times throughout the service.  A Planning Form is provided as your guide.

May these moments of reflection help to give you peace and comfort.  Know that our prayers are with you today and for the weeks to follow.

If we can be of any help to you, please do not hesitate to call (716-662-9339).

                             ⇓

 

Prayers for Mourners

  • Lord God,
    you are attentive to the voice of our pleading.
    Let us find in your Son
    comfort in our sadness,
    certainty in our doubt,
    and courage to live through this hour.
    Make our faith strong
    through Christ our Lord.
    R/. Amen.
  • Lord,
    N. is gone now from this earthly dwelling,
    and has left behind those who mourn his/her absence.
    Grant that we may hold his/her memory dear,
    never bitter for what we have lost
    nor in regret for the past,
    but always in hope of the eternal Kingdom
    where you will bring us together again.
    Through Christ our Lord.
    R/. Amen.
  • May the love of God and the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ
    bless and console us
    and gently wipe every tear from our eyes:
    in the name of the Father,
    and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
    R/. Amen.

For those who mourn the death of a child:

  • O Lord, whose ways are beyond understanding,
    listen to the prayers of your faithful people:
    that those weighed down by grief
    at the loss of this little child
    may find reassurance in your infinite goodness.
    Through Christ our Lord.
    R/.  Amen
  • Prayer in Time of Bereavement (from Catholic Online)

     Dearest Jesus, who wept at the death of your friend

    and taught that they who mourn shall be comforted,
    grant us the comfort of your presence in our loss.
    Send Your Holy Spirit to direct us
    lest we make hasty or foolish decisions.
    Send Your Spirit to give us courage
    lest through fear we recoil from living.
    Send Your Spirit to bring us your peace
    lest bitterness, false guilt, or regret take root in our hearts.

    The Lord has given.
    The Lord has taken away.
    Blessed be the name of the Lord.

    Amen.

    O sweet mother Mary,
    who knew the sadness of mourning those your heart loved most,
    Jesus, your Son,
    and Joseph, your devoted spouse,

    pray for us in our time of loss.

    Amen.

Love Is Stronger

Authored By: Pope Francis

At the General Audience the Pope speaks about the Christian answer to death.

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Death is an experience which touches all families, without exception. It is part of life; yet, where familial love is concerned, death never seems natural. For parents, surviving their own children is particularly heartbreaking; it contradicts the fundamental nature of the very relationships that give meaning to the family. The loss of a son or daughter is like time stopping altogether: it opens a chasm that swallows both past and future. Death, which takes away a little child or young person, is a blow to the promises, to the gifts and the sacrifices of love joyfully brought to the life we gave birth to. Frequently parents come to Mass at Santa Marta with the photo of a son, a daughter, a baby, a boy, a girl, and they say to me: “He’s gone, she’s gone”. And their faces are filled with grief. Death touches us and when it is a child’s, it touches us profoundly. The whole family is left paralyzed, speechless. And the child left alone by the loss of one or both parents suffers in a similar way. She asks: “Where is my daddy? Where is my mama? — Well, she is in heaven” — “Why can’t I see her?”. This question covers the agony in the heart of a child left alone. The emptiness of abandonment that opens up in him is made all the more agonizing by the fact that he doesn’t have the life-experience to even “give a name” to what has happened. “When is daddy coming back?” When is mama coming?”. What do you say when a child suffers? This is what death in the family is like.

In these cases, death is like a black hole that opens up in the life of the family and for which we have no explanation. And at times we even go so far as to lay the blame on God. How many people — I understand them — get angry with God, blaspheme: “Why did you take my son, my daughter? There is no God, God does not exist! Why did he do this?”. We hear this so often. But this anger is basically what comes from the heart in great pain; the loss of a son or of a daughter, of a father or of a mother, is a great sorrow. This happens over and over in families. In these cases, I said, death is like a hole. But physical death has “accomplices” even worse than itself, which are called hate, envy, pride, greed; in short, the sin of the world which works for death and makes it even more painful and unjust. Family bonds seem to be the predestined and helpless victims of these helping powers of death, trailing the history of mankind. Let us think of the absurd “normality” with which, at certain moments and in certain places, events adding to the horror of death are provoked by the hatred and indifference of other human beings. May the Lord keep us free from being accustomed to this! 

In the People of God, by the grace of his compassion granted in Jesus, many families prove by their deeds that death does not have the last word: this is a true act of faith. Every time a family in mourning — even terrible mourning — finds the strength to guard the faith and love that unite us to those we love, it has already prevented death from taking everything. The darkness of death should be confronted with a more intense work of love. “My God, lighten my darkness!”, is the invocation of evening prayer. In the light of the Resurrection of the Lord, who abandons none of those whom the Father entrusted to him, we can take the “sting” out of death, as the Apostle Paul says (1 Cor 15:55); we can prevent it from poisoning life, from rendering vain our love, from pushing us into the darkest chasm.

In this faith, we can console one another, knowing that the Lord has conquered death once and for all. Our loved ones are not lost in the darkness of nothing: hope assures us that they are in the good and strong hands of God. Love is stronger than death. Thus, the way is to let love grow, make it stronger, and love will guard us until the day that every tear shall be wiped away, when “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more” (Rev 21:4). If we allow ourselves to be sustained by this faith, the experience of grief can generate even stronger family bonds, a new openness to the pain of other families, a new brotherhood with families that are born and reborn in hope. To be born and reborn in hope, this gives us faith. But I would like to stress the last phrase of the Gospel which he heard today (cf. Lk 7:11-15). After Jesus brought the young man, the only son of a widow, back to life, the Gospel says: “Jesus gave him back to his mother”. And this is our hope! All our loved ones who are gone, the Lord will give them back to us and we will be together with them. This hope does not disappoint! Let us remember well this action of Jesus: “And Jesus gave him back to his mother”, thus the Lord will do with all our loved ones in the family! This faith protects us from the nihilist vision of death, as well as from the false consolations of the world, so that the Christian truth “does not risk mixing itself with myths of various types”, surrendering to superstitions beliefs (Benedict XVI,Angelus, 2 November 2008). Today it is necessary that Pastors and all Christians express in a more concrete way the meaning of the faith in regards to the family experience of grief. We should not deny them the right to weep — we must weep in mourning — “Jesus wept” and was “deeply troubled” by the grave loss of a family that he loved (cf. Jn 11:33-37). We can draw from the simple and strong testimony of the many families who have been able to grasp, in the most arduous transition of death, the safe passage of the Lord, Crucified and Risen, with his irrevocable promise of the resurrection of the dead. God’s work of love is stronger than the work of death. It is of that love, it is precisely of that love, that we must make ourselves hard-working “accomplices”, with our faith! And let us remember Jesus’ deed: “And Jesus gave him back to his mother”, so he will do with all our loved ones and with us when we meet again, when death will be definitively conquered in us. It was conquered by Jesus’ Cross. Jesus will give us all back to the family!

For the full text, click here.