The Vatican has slightly softened its stance when it comes to the ashes of the dead, saying Tuesday that Catholic families may keep a small portion of their relative's cremated ashes in a "place of significance" to them rather than in a church or cemetery. It's the Catholic Church's latest adjustment to its policy, which only started permitting cremations in 1963. In a 2016 guidance prompted by what it called an "unstoppable increase" in cremation, per the New York Times, the Vatican emphasized that cremated ashes may not be scattered, kept at home, or preserved in mementos, but had to be laid to rest in "a sacred place." Those who intended to have their ashes scattered were not to have a Catholic funeral, reports Time.
Reuters reports the Vatican's doctrinal office said that relatives may now ask the ecclesiastical authority for "a minimal part of the ashes of their relative [to be stored] in a place of significance for the history of the deceased person ... provided that every type of pantheistic, naturalistic, or nihilistic misunderstanding is ruled out." It's also now permitted to mix ashes in a common urn, but the identity of each deceased person must be listed "so as not to lose the memory of their names."
Time notes the new instructions don't address other growing forms of dealing with human remains, such as human composting and the liquefaction process known as alkaline hydrolysis, though the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine in March found they didn't "satisfy the church's requirements for proper respect for the bodies of the dead." (Read about human composting here.)
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