In hurricane's wake, a new dilemma: Treating the dead with dignity

Published: 2005-09-02

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Not long after Hurricane Katrina devastated U.S. cities along the Gulf of Mexico, news media captured an image as indelible as it was poignant: a woman weeping alongside the body of her common-law husband, who had died of cancer amid the rising floodwaters of New Orleans. With his body wrapped in a sheet, she found little solace and even less help until, for $20, a truck driver carted both the woman and her dead companion in a flatbed truck filled with downed tree limbs to a hospital. It is "an image that's stayed with me the last couple of days, the woman with the body of her husband on a raft, carrying him down the streets, floating his body to some place of proper repose," said Msgr. James Moroney, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Liturgy. "What was she looking for? She was looking for a way to carry him to his place of rest. She was looking for the arms of God," he added. The woman's plight brings home one dilemma that will confront Catholics throughout the hurricane-stricken areas of the Gulf Coast: how to deal with the dead with dignity. Hundreds were feared killed in the hurricane, although no comprehensive tally was available in the days immediately afterward.

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