The Right to Rites

When Colette died (TIME, Aug. 16), all France seemed to mourn. Within two hours, 10,000 Parisians gathered silently in the garden of the Palais-Royal beneath the novelist's windows; four days later she was buried with a state funeral. But the Roman Catholic Church denied her its rites. At 81, Novelist Colette--whose books were far from other-worldly--had been twice divorced, was long out of communion with the church. Last week, in the weekly Figaro Litteraire, British Novelist Graham (The End of the Affair) Greene, a Roman Catholic convert, took Paris' Cardinal Archbishop Feltin to task for his decision. Wrote Greene:

"It is the right of all who are baptized Catholics to be accompanied to the tomb by a priest. We cannot lose this right--as one can lose the citizenship of a temporal country--by committing a crime or misdemeanor, for no human can judge another . . .

"Are two civil marriages so unpardonable? The lives of some of our saints offer even worse examples. True, they repented. But ... no one can say what goes through the mind when the spirit is drawn to lucidity by the immediacy of death . . .

"Your Eminence has given . . . the impression that the church pursues errors to the other side of the deathbed . . . Is it to warn your flock of the danger of treating marriage lightly? It would certainly have been better to warn them of the danger of condemning others too easily . . ."

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