Fr. John A. Perricone: O Death, Where Is Thy…Tickle?

Death just isn’t what it used to be. That is, if the conversation I heard the other day was any indication. It was at a modest restaurant where a number of joined tables were accommodating a rather large family. My ears shot up when I heard the odd phrase “bereavement team.” Odder still was the seventyish, Italian woman saying it. Trendy phrases like that are expected from soccer moms or deracinated chancery bureaucrats, not from an affection-oozing lady who could easily be pictured over an outsized, dented, aluminum pot stirring tomato sauce.

That wasn’t all. This large ethnic woman, perfectly imagined praying at a Sacred Heart novena, began comfortably gabbing about a questionnaire required by the Liturgy Committee for Grandpa Tony’s Mass of the Resurrection. Incongruities were flying. It was as if Jimmy Durante had been delivering a lecture on Deconstructionist epistemology. What was happening here? Who turned that good Italian lady’s soul inside out? …

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