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Sometimes the money taken from a family for the coffin
represents an extraordinary
profit of 500% for the undertaker.
Funeral rip-offs
By James Gilhooley
The late Jessica Mitford has returned to haunt the funeral industry. An updated edition of her 1963 best-seller The American Way of Death Revisited has come off the presses. It has caused many funeral management types to fervently wish they were dead. The book has much to tell all of us.
One of the heroes of the book is a priest, Father Henry Wasielewski of Texas. He is one of three people to whom the book is dedicated.
Fr. W. in 1983 became upset by families being shamelessly gouged by some funeral directors in Houston. He set up an ecumenical group known as the Interfaith Funeral Information Committee.
Initially, he and his colleagues established two telephone numbers. A poor family losing someone to death might get good information promptly. One message was in English and the other Spanish. Those phoning were supplied with the names of five area funeral homes. Each would give an entire funeral for $650. There were other funeral homes in the same area which were asking three times as much for similar services.
For those in a higher financial bracket, Wasielewski and his group catalogued sixteen mortuaries in the Houston area that offered a complete funeral for $2,500. As a warning to these families, he listed one hundred funeral houses that required anywhere from $3,000 to $9,910 for the same coffins and services.
Sometimes the money taken from the family for the coffin represents an extraordinary profit of 500% for the undertaker. Wasielewski feels that a markup of anywhere from 50 to 100% is acceptable.
This plundering of families in their weakest moments comes at a time when significant areas of the funeral industry are being gobbled up by giant enterprises. In Houston, one such group controlled seven funeral parlors. They are in the group of the above charging as high as $9,910 for what others charge $2,500. We are talking about something approaching a mini-monopoly.
These groups are not above buying out privately owned parlors. If you cannot beat them, you buy them out. They may fold the Mom & Pop operations up in quick order. Thus they make themselves the only act in town. Their pillaging of the bereaved becomes easier. So, a coffin for which they pay $140 or even less is sold to a poor family for $1,995. (These, incidentally, are actual prices from Mitford’s book. They are not fiction.)
Cremation is not above Fr. W.’s interest. His group lists twenty funeral groups that offer cremations in Houston for $700. He warns families that other groups charge anywhere from $2,745 to $3,985 for a similar operation.
One grim warning that Fr. Wasielewski and his friends pass on is that priests and clergy in general are oftentimes being used by funeral operations. This is the latter’s dirty little secret.
Gifts to clergy range on the high end from “country club memberships, trips on mortuary airplanes, and tickets to sporting events.”
On the low end, there are those calendars at the new year. Many pastors proudly distribute them to one and all. They of course bear the name and all-important phone number of the funeral parlor that is the donor.
This is advertising pure and simple at its cheapest. And parishes do all the work. Is this service for parishioners really necessary? Is it morally soundproof?
As a parish priest, I recall the bottles of good Scotch and the twenty five dollar checks from the smiling and genial undertaker. These gifts (bribes?) regularly found their way without any resistance into the rectory for me and fellow priests. They were usually confined to the Christmas season over the years but not always. Arguably, in police lingo, I and my colleagues were on the “take.”
Very few of us ever worked as advocate for our parishioners vis-a-vis the undertaker. It simply was considered bad manners. And of course the price of all these goodies, however nickel and dime they might be, is passed along to the consumer, a.k.a. parishioners.
Do funeral parlors expect a return? Listen to one quoted in Mitford’s book. “Am I out hustling business? You’re damn right I am. . . . You always hope you will get recommended when you make a donation. That’s why you do it. You expect your association and friendship with priests and ministers will bring you some business.”
Critics may counter that sometimes these gifts are well intentioned and sincere. You will get no argument from me. There are honest and ethical funeral people out there. I too have met them. So obviously has Fr. Wasielewski.
Should parishes in our own cities, towns, etc. be doing something along the lines of Fr. W. and his colleagues? If people need stand-up advocates, it is at the time of a death in the family. For some, it is either that or going into serious debt.
When a death strikes my family, I would very much want a Fr. Wasielewski clone at our side.
Should a priest or a deacon or some responsible person from the parish accompany a bereaved family to the funeral parlor as they choose coffin, etc.? Does he or she make a difference? “The man who has the clergyman making the selection for his families does have a nasty problem,” wrote an undertaker. They are less likely to be stampeded into purchasing a “copper casket of SEAMLESS construction, made without joints or seams of any kind” (Mitford).
Many parishes have Social Justice components in their Parish Councils. Surely they should prevent the mugging of their fellow parishioners at the hands of hardly disinterested undertakers. This is a question of justice at their front door. Families, already walking painfully down Debt Street on their ankles, would be indebted to them.
Perhaps Catholic parishes should follow Houston’s style and make their enterprise an ecumenical venture. An investment in Mitford’s how-to book would be a good beginning.
Should our seminaries be touching on this subject in pastoral theology courses? I think yes. Burying the dead is a corporal work of mercy. Surely part of that work is to prevent families being hurled into something approaching bankruptcy. I cannot recall the topic being ever discussed during my own seminary years.
Should each diocese send out a monitum to its parishes? Perhaps this could be done through presbyteral councils, priest senates, etc. Many of the latter groups have committees on Social Justice searching for worthwhile and doable issues.
Should we be pushing toward having modest, unpretentious coffins for the wealthy and the poor alike? Such is apparently a custom favored by the Jews and other religious groups. Is that not the intent of the white burial cloth we place on the coffin at the entrance to the church? Everyone whether rich or poor enters the nave on equal terms.
Should priests set an example and be buried in less costly fashion and splendor? I was at a priest funeral recently where the admittedly beautiful red-lined velvet coffin was worthy of a Pharaoh. I wager the country pastor in question resting in it would have been outraged at the price.
Why could we not be buried in an unadorned pine box with our head resting on the pillow from our bed? Undertakers might well be tempted to take the gas pipe, but our people would get a message loud and clear.
The question under discussion is one of justice for parishioners — frequently very, very poor people. The evidence suggests that oftentimes they are being robbed deaf, dumb, and blind.
Incidentally, Father Wasielewski has gone on line. His Web site is www.xroads.com/funerals.
Reverend James Gilhooley is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. His articles have appeared in America, Commonweal, the Tablet (London), the Month (London), Church, etc. He is also a book reviewer for the Catholic News Service. He wrote the homilies in the March 2000 issue.
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