§ 218. The Burial of the Dead
The dead member the Church sends off with prayers and buries him in a special consecrated place, and that is the cemetery.
The church rite at the burial of deceased members of the Church is prescribed in the Trebnik. Special rites exist for laymen, for clergy, for monks, and for children. There is, again, a special rite for the funeral service that must be performed on the day of Christ’s Resurrection and during Bright Week. And every member of the Church who has died at peace with the Church must be given the funeral rite according to the prescribed order.
It is forbidden to bury with the church rite: 1) all those who do not belong to the Orthodox Church—hence non-Christians in the first place, and then heretics and schismatics; 2) children of Christian parents who have died unbaptized; 3) obstinate sinners, who die in a mortal sin known to everyone, without confession and repentance, and who will not receive the holy mysteries; 4) deliberate suicides;[1] 5) those who perish in a duel;[2] and 6) those who have been condemned to death for crimes by a lawful court.[3] Not only can none of these be given the funeral rite by an Orthodox priest according to the prescribed order, but by the canons they cannot even be buried in a consecrated Orthodox cemetery. It is likewise forbidden to give the funeral rite to the body of a Christian who, while alive, ordered that his body be burned (cremation), where his relatives intend to carry out that order.[4]
As regards heterodox Christians, when they die in some place where there is neither a priest of the deceased’s own confession nor a separate cemetery in which they could be buried, the more recent legislation of individual local churches permits an Orthodox priest to give the heterodox Christian the funeral rite according to a rite specially prescribed for such cases, and to allow the heterodox deceased to be buried in an Orthodox cemetery. But the Orthodox priest may do this only after he has reported it to the competent diocesan bishop and has received the corresponding permission from him.[5]
In burying the deceased, the priest must always take into account the prescriptions of the sanitary laws of the state in question, and accordingly he must not allow the deceased to be buried before the prescribed time has elapsed since death, and before the legally prescribed forensic-medical examination of the deceased’s body has been carried out.[6]
Everyone has the right to determine where he wishes to be buried. If the person in question has determined nothing about this, then he is buried in the general cemetery of the parish to which he belonged. The competent parish priest has the right to bury his own parishioners; but if some parishioner is to be buried outside his own parish, the regular parish priest of that deceased parishioner nevertheless retains the right to the burial fee prescribed by the stole-fee tariff, just as the priest in whose parish the burial is to take place also has the right to the corresponding remuneration.[7]
Just as in the ancient Church the names of the deceased were entered into the corresponding diptychs, so from this arose the Church’s ordinance that priests must enter into special books the names of everyone who dies in the parish in question, and these are today’s registers of the dead, from which the prescribed extracts are afterward issued to the competent authorities.[8]