Should bombing suspects be buried?

Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was yesterday buried at an undisclosed location in Worcester, Massachusetts.

His remains were entombed thanks to a “courageous and compassionate individual (who) came forward,” local police said yesterday.

The burial ends a week-long controversy among the religious community and Americans at large over whether the suspected terrorist — killed in a police shootout — should have a burial. 

After the Boston Marathon bombings, local Christian leaders stepped swiftly into the public eye, convening vigils and urging peaceful healing in the wake of senseless violence.

But their public voices fell mostly silent as noisy resistance grew to the prospect that suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev could be buried in local soil.

Cemeteries and even some mosques refused to take his body. His city, Cambridge, urged family members to bury him elsewhere. 

Conscience

Republican US Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez and local talk radio host Dan Rae wanted him dumped in the ocean, like Osama bin Laden. Clergy largely kept mum.

“The only signs of people who are showing some sort of moral conscience are those few who stand with a card near the funeral home saying (burial) is a corporal work of mercy,” said James Keenan, a moral theologian at Boston College. 

“To say, ‘we won’t bury him’ makes us barbaric. It takes away mercy, the trademark of Christians. ... I’m talking about this because somebody should.”

The Christian silence was notable, observers said, in part because death rituals are typically the domain of the faith community. 

In matters of death, religious figures are primary sources for guidance in what to do — but not in this public episode.

“I’ve not heard a lot from the Christian community” on this issue, said Joel Anderle, senior pastor of Community Covenant Church in West Peabody, Massachusetts, and president of the Massachusetts Council of Churches.

“This is one of those curious areas where Christianity, and in particular Protestant Christianity, has come to believe that it doesn’t have a voice.”

The issue isn’t theological uncertainty. Believers of all stripes would have said Tsarnaev should be buried — in local soil if necessary, perhaps in an unmarked grave — as a matter of respect for personhood, for the human body and for God, according to Laura Everett, executive director of the MCC. 

She notes Christians are known for burying even pariahs, including those executed for heinous crimes or left to die in the streets, as acts of faithful witness.

Why then today’s reticence? Some blame the media. 

Christian leaders would have loved to say why even a killer should have a burial, but reporters weren’t giving them a platform, according to the Reverend Suzanne Wade, priest-in-charge at St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Westford.

“We have a moral imperative to say yes to the burial,” she said. 

“But I wonder if the voices of those who would speak peace are being muted because the conflict is a much better story.”

Others suspected reticence served particular purposes for faith leaders, who must walk a delicate line in the aftermath of a devastating disaster. 

These purposes might be lofty and pastoral, or part of something less holy, depending on one’s perspective.

Because the bombings left more than 260 people injured and dozens maimed, pastors across the region are ministering to parishioners who were hurt or know victims and still feel the sting of the attacks. 

Such pastors may have been too upset or angry to champion mercy and respect for a man responsible for their people’s misery, according to Revd Wade. “It’s much easier for me to be that public voice than it is perhaps for people who have somebody very close to them who was affected,” she said. 

“Distance allows a perspective that you can’t get when you’re living in the middle of it.”

What’s more, the best pastoral outcome would probably have been for a burial to take place with consent from Tsarnaev’s family and with minimal fanfare, Ms Everett said. 

In their reticence, faith leaders may have been trying to keep the debate from escalating, since no one is served well by a heightened, emotional spectacle.

“There’s deep consternation in the religious community and deep desire for this to be resolved,” she said. “Religious leaders are weighing how best to be useful in that.”

Some observers wondered whether something less charitable might be unfolding. 

Christian leaders in past centuries called for burning witches at the stake and having criminals buried at crossroads, where vehicles would run over them, said Gary Laderman, a historian who studies death rituals at Emory University.

Dr Laderman said he saw “echoes from previous eras” in calls from the general public for burials to be denied to an enemy such as Tsarnaev. 

He warned that religious leaders can contribute to desecration by what they sanction, encourage, say or don’t say.

“There’s a way in which religious leaders and cultures can inflame the passions even more about wanting to desecrate (the bodies of) the most vile people on earth,” he said.

Christians beyond the Boston area took steps to see that Tsarnaev got a burial. 

The group Evangelicals for Social Action collected 42 signatures for a new petition calling on Christian cemeteries to accept Tsarnaev’s body. 

Paul Keane, originally of Hamden, Connecticut, offered the Tsarnaevs a plot beside his late mother in a church cemetery, because she “taught me to’love thine enemy’,” he said.

Vilification

Boston Christians worried some peers were being cowed into silence by vocal opponents, such as those who targeted funeral director Peter Stefan for saying he would find a burial site for Tsarnaev, in Russia if not the US.

When Pastor Anderle said on his Facebook page that Christians should be “utterly scandalized” when a burial is blocked, others said he took a risk.

“There is this sense of, ‘I really appreciate what you’re saying, but that sure seems a dangerous thing to point out in a society that’s hell bent on retributive justice’,” he said. 

“We can’t engage without fear of being ... vilified and attacked. That’s sad.” n