Tuesday, July 28, 2026From the news

Where Love Is Not Deceived

In the face of a funeral director's horrific betrayal, we find consolation in knowing that no human evil can separate our beloved dead from the unshakeable love of God.

And Jesus wept.

John 11:35

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39

My dear friends in Christ, it is difficult to read the news from Hull without feeling a profound sense of sorrow and sickness in our hearts. To learn of a funeral director betraying the sacred trust of grieving families, leaving the bodies of their loved ones neglected while performing a cruel charade, is to confront a truly deep darkness. The pain described by the families—the nightmares, the trauma, the feeling of being violated by a man who smiled as he deceived them—is almost unimaginable. In a time of vulnerability, they were met not with compassion, but with a cold and calculated evil.

In such moments of horror, we may ask: where is God? Where is goodness and light when such darkness seems to prevail? Our faith does not offer easy answers, but it does offer a person. It offers Jesus. When his friend Lazarus died, and he saw the grief of Mary and Martha, the Gospel tells us in its shortest, most powerful verse: “And Jesus wept.” Our God is not a distant, unfeeling deity. He enters into our suffering. He stands beside the grieving and weeps with them. We must have faith that Jesus weeps today with every family in Hull who has been so grievously wounded.

The Church has always taught us to honor the bodies of the dead. Burying the dead is one of the corporal works of mercy, a sacred duty. We do this because we believe the human body was a temple of the Holy Spirit, and because we hold fast to the promise of the resurrection. The actions described in this story are a horrific violation of that dignity and a grave sin against charity and justice. We must name this evil for what it is.

And yet, and this is the promise we must cling to with all our might, this terrible act does not have the final word. The ultimate dignity of our beloved dead does not rest in the hands of a funeral director, but in the hands of Almighty God. Saint Paul writes to the Romans with a conviction that must become our own: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life... nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This man’s evil could desecrate a body, but it could not touch the soul. It could not sever the bond of love that holds that person in God’s eternal memory. To the families who scattered what they thought were their loved one’s ashes, who wore lockets with a stranger’s remains, who feel their final acts of love were made a mockery: please, take heart. God saw your love. He saw your tender goodbyes, your desire to honor your mother, your father, your child. He received the love in your heart, which was true and pure. No deception on earth can nullify a genuine act of love. Your love was not wasted. It was, and is, seen by God.

The path to healing from such a wound will be long. But let us entrust these families, and the souls of their departed, to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who knows our griefs intimately. Let us pray that they may one day find peace in the unshakable truth that their loved ones are safe, held not in a neglected room, but in the eternal, loving embrace of their Creator.