Liscannor parishioners meet bishop over using church as a funeral home

A delegation of parishioners representing the north Clare parish of Liscannor met with the Bishop of Galway, Michael Drennan this week in an effort to persuade the bishop to allow the local church to be used as a place of repose for the deceased. 

Although churches in the Killaloe diocese are available as places of repose as they are permitted to do so by Bishop Willie Walsh, the Bishop of Galway has liturgical objections to the practice in his diocese, of which Liscannor is part. 

Speaking to the Clare Champion newspaper this week Liscannor parish council member Patrick Blake said, “It’s causing a lot of hurt and pain that we have to be prolonging the situation and arguing like this.”

“We don’t want this role at all.  We would rather if the bishop showed a bit of kindness, dignity and humility, so that we can carry on and treat the church in a dignified way like we were doing,” he added.

Mr Blake claimed that Dr Drennan is ‘’against it from a liturgical point of view, in that he feels the church shouldn’t be used like that.  The question we ask as a community is why can a bishop, cardinal and a pope be laid out in a church and why can the Killaloe diocese operate this system?”

Mr Blake added “We don’t want to go any further than this and we look forward to the bishop saying ‘yes’ on this issue.  But if he doesn’t, we will have to go to Plan B and continue this.  We are doing things very democratically at the moment and we’ll always continue to do that but if protest is required to sell our message, we will have to do that,” he forecast. 

Ennistymon county councillor Martin Conway says that utilising the church as a place of repose, when there is no funeral home available nearby, helps the grieving process.

“It’s a very peaceful, dignified and very spiritual way of reposing a body.  People go into the church and sympathise and then go down to the back of the church, light a candle and say a prayer for the deceased,” he explained.

When asked by CINEWS, a spokesperson for Bishop Drennan said that the Diocese of Galway is making no comment on the meeting.

by Sean Ryan