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Out of the question: Liturgical colour at requiems

by
14 September 2010

Write, if you have any answers to the questions listed at the end of this section, or would like to add to the answers below.

Your answers

I have increasingly noted the use of white as the liturgical colour at funeral requiems rather than the customary purple. Are there any guidelines relating to this custom?

Common Worship notes this of liturgical colours at funerals in general: “[White] may be used in preference to purple or black for funerals, and should be used at the funeral of a child.” We ought also to remember that all liturgical colours in the Church of England are “suggested. . . they are not mandatory and traditional or local use may be followed” (ibid.).

Where white is used at requiems, this tends to follow the tradition, popularised after Vatican II, of emphasising above all else the resurrection hope at a funeral. Black, which is still used in some parishes, perhaps has the effect of better expressing the grief and desolation that is very often the experience of the bereaved. Purple, the traditional Anglican choice for funerals, brings to mind the themes of both Advent and Lent, and expresses both the regret and sorrow present, and the hope and “looking forward” that the liturgy calls us to proclaim at a funeral.

Perhaps the most important thing to guard against, of which the superseded book The Promise of His Glory warned, is the danger of placing the dead into “supposedly neat categories”. A parish, particularly a small or rural one, will notice if the priest wears white for some funerals and not for others, and might begin to ask why, with conceivably disastrous pastoral consequences.

(The Revd) Tom Clammer
(Gloucester Diocesan Worship Officer)
Apperley, Gloucester

[Black eucharistic vestments, where found, often display a combination of black and gold. Editor]

Your questions

Is it ever proper to fly the St George’s flag at half mast over a Church of England church? What was done when King George VI died?
A. S.

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