A funeral pyre in a Catholic cemetery is usually unimaginable in India, where Christians prefer burial to dispose of the bodies of their community members.
Contrary to this belief and centuries-old practice, a Catholic diocese in southern India has decided to cremate Covid-19 victims in parish cemeteries, indirectly adopting a Hindu way of disposing of the bodies of the dead. Thresiamma Sebastian, 62, a parishioner of St Augustine Church in Mararikulum village in the Diocese of Alleppey in Kerala State, became the first local Catholic to have a dignified cremation in a parish cemetery. The parish priest and Catholic volunteers, helped by an outsourcing agency, prepared her funeral pyre with firewood and placed her body on it in the July 27 cremation. Health officials monitored the entire process. Her body was reduced to ashes within two hours and her ashes were collected in an earthen pot and buried in her family tomb in the presence of one of her family members on the same day.
The Latin-rite Diocese of Alleppey is mostly based on the coast and most of its parishes face the same situation.