15. Pavarotti's Funeral: A Note of Discord

Pavarotti chose sunflowers because "They seek the light"
Acrylic Painting (10x14ins) 

The same day that Pavarotti died, his body was laid in state in the Cathedral of Modena, the same city where the most famous contemporary tenor in the world was born lived and died. The next morning as I was lying half asleep and half awake the radio clock woke me with the news that one of the priests in Modena declared that since they had put the body of Pavarotti there, the Cathedral had been deconsecrated. This priest wasn’t able to figure out why the Tenor was been given a state funeral, since Pavarotti was not the President nor a high prelate, but a simple Christian who was a proclaimed sinner as he not only divorced his first wife but also married another- something that was not permissible in the Catholic Church. Every thing that the priest had said could not be confounded, it was true. This, however, did not make it any easier to have to acknowledge that there were hordes of poor devils in the same position as Pavarotti- declared sinners- since they no longer lived with the wife they married in Church. But on the other hand neither could the phrase “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” be erased from the Gospels.

“Now,” I said as I started to climb out of bed, “I wonder how the Church is going to get out of that little fix.”

Quite honestly, I found there was nothing extravagant about the funeral: a few white and red roses among a cluster of sunflowers was as much of the luxury as I could see. Neither did there seem to be any rigorous formality about the whole affair- it appeared as if the good nature of the deceased had sprung out of the coffin and saturated the atmosphere. Phrases like, “I hope there’s not going to be a lot of dark clothes at my funeral” and “Sunflowers, sunflowers because they seek the light,” came to mind. The climax of course was when a recording of some years ago where Luciano and his father, in the same Cathedral, sang “Panis Angelicus,” not in unison but one voice echoing the other… as if the father was calling the son and the son was resonating his reply.

If the performance of “Panis Angelicus” (Heavenly Bread), that same heavenly bread that had been denied to Pavarotti after he re-married, as the Church forbids those who re-marry participating in the sacrament of the Eucharist, sent goose-pimples up many an arm, the Bishop who celebrated the Mass tried to fix the unfixable by saying that a funeral in the Cathedral cannot be denied to anyone who is a Catholic unless that person expresses that it should not be administrated, and that a funeral is not a question of rulers and regulations but the presentation of a soul to the mercy of God. However, even though such enunciations by a Bishop shows that there are as many opinions as there are mansions in the House of God, it did leave me with the sense that there is a need for the church to give the question of divorce more thought and not just leave things as they are because such, translated in daily living, is simply an absurdity.