Tony Danza’s Funeral Outburst Makes Sense

Good for Tony.

I’ve been to too many funerals where the presiding pastor droned on all about how the recently departed was “saved” and therefore going to heaven instead of hell. And then droning on about how each an everyone in attendance needs to get right with God before you die. I can easily see how if you know the person that dies and knew that they didn’t buy in to the whole saved and damned, heaven and hell business, that you might feel like telling that presiding priest (or pastor) to basically shut the hell up.

I’ll bet that priest doesn’t do that again. Maybe, the problem is that no one has ever asked (told) a priest that they should talk less about the bible and more about the deceased. The only response most give is “Thank you.”

I couldn’t agree more. Having been to a lot of funerals recently, I’m more and more acutely aware of how little most funerals are actually about the decedents or their families. I understand that people who are religious should have that aspect of their lives respected and recognized during the funeral, but if I have to listen to one more preacher go on and on about salvation and damnation I’m simply going to scream… much like Tony Danza.

Some years ago, a football player at a local high school died and they had a large funeral for him. (several hundred people) At one point they asked if anyone wanted to share memories of him, and this woman got up and talked about how she had just been driving by and Jesus had tugged her heart to come and and talk about salvation.

The deceased had been Jewish. They had rented space at a Christian megachurch because they were expecting over a thousand people.

Extremely upset congregation when she was done and an usher escorted her out. Absolutely crazy crashing a funeral to proselytize.

Totally agree with what Danza did.

My step-grandfather passed away a couple of years ago and the funeral was actually really nice. A similar situation happened. The priest or whatever started talking about god and someone stood up put a stop to that quickly. We spent the rest of the time telling funny stories about him.

After the funeral there was a wake at a bar. Charlie and my grandmother would go to that bar on a weekly basis for over 20 years. They met when she was working there as a bartender. The wake was awesome. Standing room only– people telling stories about Charlie– buying him drinks, etc. It may sound a little tacky, but it was appropriate. When you consider that fact, it was rather nice.

Same sort of thing happened at the memorial of Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afganistan.(The story’s really upsetting, as there are hints that his fellow soldiers dispised him for his atheism, and the government covered up his friendly fire death). His brother got up and denounced all the “he’s with god” talk. The whole video is great, but watch out, language is NSFW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huyg8SiDa7k&feature=related

My grandmother’s funeral was a little like that. My uncle hired his minister who felt it was appropriate to talk about the need for everyone to accept J.C.

What made it more irritating is that she wasn’t religious. If the dead could spin, she would’a knocked the coffin right over and rolled out the door.

First thing Danza has ever done that I admire.
The priest got off lucky. Remember, Danza was a professional boxer before he became an actor.
If he’d REALLY wante to be a dick …

I guess this is a cue to make sure you check up on the people you invite to speak. And invite only people that knew the person in question. The fact that a Christian priest was hired though, you need to expect some Jesus talk. Usually that’s kept pretty short, maybe this one carried on too long.

I always liked Tony Danza. I still do.

Major dick move. The priest just did what he thought was expected of him. Let’s be for real, folks…what the fuck ELSE would you expect a priest to do?
To treat a pig like shit for acting like a pig is being a dick in a major way.

I was at that sort of funeral earlier this year, with a sleazeball “pastor” using it as a sales opportunity for his sect’s beliefs. At one point they even claimed the deceased had “accepted Jesus.”

Fine, right? Could be true? Not really. You haven’t really seen how low they can go until you see someone stand up and tell a roomful of mourners that a dead eighteen-month-old child accepted Jesus. Sickening.

Speaking of dick moves, the article says that after the priest was done, Danza went to speak and people heckled *him*! Tough crowd.

This priest knew next to nothing about Carlo and he thought he was fit to perform the funeral service because he knew something about the Bible. What arrogance.

Wait, how is the priest arrogant? Whether the priest knew Carlo or not is irrelevant. He was hired to perform a funeral service and he talked about the bible. He is a priest. He’s being arrogant for doing his job? If the priest didn’t know Carlo personally, how could he possibly perform the service otherwise?

In Tony Danza’s shoes I probably would have acted the same due to my emotions. But I also think the priest was put into a no win situation.

Go Danza! I’ve been to several funerals in the last few years for people of faith and everyone of them was incredibly depressing as the minister (all Calvinist types) went on and on with a bible sermon. Reminded me that i need to get my will in order so so i don’t put my family and friends that horrible crap. To make sure i’m not caught died in a church.

Bravo Tony! Usually I’m in the “don’t be a dick” crowd, but in this case I think it was totally warranted. The priest was trying to use a funeral to push his own agenda. Funerals should be about remembering the deceased, and comforting friends and family. The priest was the one being a dick, and Tony was right on the money telling him to cut it out.

“…hold me closer Tony Danza…” 🙂

I wish I had the balls to do that at my Mother’s funeral.

FYI people, funeral doesn’t = religious ceremony. To say as much is making a HUGE leap away from our actual history and, like with marriage, trumping it for an antiquated belief.

Humans were burying people and remembering them WELL before the Jesus myth popped up on the scene.

At the funeral of the mother of a close friend of mine, the director got the pastor at the Jehovah’s Witness temple to officiate, even though she hadn’t been a member or even religious for a long time. I guess he simply couldn’t fathom having a funeral without some sort of preacher there. Not knowing her very well, the pastor turned the whole thing into “Come to Jesus” sermon. He said at one point, “If she could speak right now, she’d tell you to turn to Jesus.” At that point, my increasingly pissed off friend said, quite audibly, “No, she’d say get me out of this fucking coffin.” The service came to a close fairly quickly. 🙂

I wasn’t a fan of Tony’s, until now. He rocks. I’d probably do the same if I was there, and someday maybe I will.

This gives hope to people who are scared to tell Christians when they’re doing something wrong. They need to be told!

Thank you, Tony Danza. You rock.

Also:

His wife, Laura, told us, “The funeral went very well, and we know Phil would have been very happy. We all agreed that the priest had to go and leave it to Phil’s friends to come to the rescue.”

Also, Heidi beat me to it

I would have to say it’s ridiculous to be angry at Tony Danza. First of all, if it bothers you that he tried to de-religionize the funeral or something, can’t you just chock up his outburst to grief? Secondly, he makes a good point. Every funeral I’ve gone to becomes more about everyone else and their relationship with god and hardly anything (relative to what should be said) is mentioned about the deceased.

However, I would say shame on Tony if he knew that Philip’s family were very religious. Funerals are for the ones left living, not the ones dead. So his outburst would be rude if his family was traditionally very religious and wanted the funeral to be that way. Besides, the people that really knew Philip don’t need a stale old man to help them feel their loss.

This makes me think of Kevin Tillman bursting out during his brothers funeral when McCain made it all god-y.

Since nobody’s looking at this from the priest’s point of view, (sorry if I missed any) I will:

This MAY have been a dick move, depending on circumstances that are not available in the article.

In the tenth coment, sc0tt points out that…

Funerals don’t just happen, they are planned and directed events.

…and so you get what you ask for, and it’s dickish to object after you or someone else has set it up. I can see his point.

Parallel to that, I think it could have been an unfair move against the priest because of a different possibility:

Actually, funerals are often not well planned at all, but hastily thrown together by people who are upset and distracted. It can be quite chaotic and ad-lib. If the deceased or the family did not have well established relationships with clergy, somebody just calls up a priest randomly because nobody else seems to be organizing the thing.
There’s a good possibility that the priest was called in at the last minute, and knew nothing about Philip Carlo. There’s a clue here:

A source at Thursday’s wake at Peter C. La Bella Funeral Home in Bensonhurst said the priest — “who said he was a substitute priest from a federal prison…

If the priest had no time to interview the family, it’s not at all his fault that he had to fall back on a generic religious service. He’s in a tough position. He’s trying to give some comfort and sense of propriety and dignity to people in grief, but he has no information and very little time for preparation.

Hemant says:

No wonder Danza was upset. This priest knew next to nothing about Carlo and he thought he was fit to perform the funeral service because he knew something about the Bible.

What arrogance.

That has a big jump to a conclusion in it. I’m sure the priest was asked to speak. He didn’t crash the party uninvited, and if he didn’t know anything about Carlo, that might not at all be his fault if it was all arranged at the last minute.

Tony Danza may have had a legitimate complaint about the services not being enough about his friend, but to take it out on the priest as if the priest was deliberately minimizing the importance of Carlo’s individuality is assuming a lot and assuming the worst.

Assuming a lot and assuming the worst are usually the beginnings of a dickish move.

Ironically, in the end the service still wasn’t that much about his friend. It was more about Tony Danza. Just look at the wording of the headline of this post.

Or maybe the priest was ASKED by the family to say a funeral and wasn’t given any insight/assistance ahead of time.

What’s arrogant (and bigoted) is your assumption of the worst about the priest, because of your own beliefs.

My grandmother was an atheist. Her memorial was low key, but religious. At the end I stood up and said: “Out of respect for grandma, I’d like to remind everyone that aside from everything said here today, she was an atheist.” That was it, and that was enough. A couple of family looked a bit uncomfortable, but a few more thanked me. I’m pretty sure it was what she would have done- correct the misconception, and then move on.

I hope that Danza realized that since he is a celebrity, he was not only taking on the priest but also all of the “oppressed” Christians/Catholics in America.

I hope that he made his decision fully aware of that, and if he did then I respect him even more.

I’ve only been to two funerals (one for a secular Jew and one for a Sikh), so I’ve never encountered preaching. I do sympathize with Tony Danza, and I’m quite sure that I’m going to have to grit my teeth when I’m eventually forced to attend a Christian funeral. However, I can’t blame the poor priest in this situation, either. If they didn’t want someone to go on and on about religion, they shouldn’t have invited a Catholic priest to speak in the first place. He was just doing his job.

Many years ago, my wife’s mother died, and we and our three young children attended her funeral. Her minister conducted it. His eulogy consisted entirely of telling the children there “if you don’t accept Christ into your lives, you will never see Maw Maw again, for she is now in heaven with Jesus and you won’t be.” And variations on that. He said very nearly nothing about her.

We were furious but I was pleasantly surprised as well when all filed out and people mingled outside chatting, that others in her family, as devout as she was, and members of her congregation were also appalled at what had happened.

This story made me feel great!

My grandpa died in September and someone invited Jesus to his funeral.
I was so upset during the service while this minister was speaking. Everything great and wonderful that made my grandpa my grandpa was turned around to equate him with leading a Christ-like life. Pray with me, stand, kneel, recite the Lord’s prayer, listen to this verse, now listen to the same verse in the form of a poem; now pray with me some more.
After the service, my brother, sister-in-law; my 2 cousins and I all agreed that that scam artist was way over the top. We all agreed that it felt like we had gone to church.
We also agreed that none of us, aged between 23-30, had not once heard our grandpa, who was 94 when he died, mention the bible, or god, or especially Jesus.
In fact, the only story I can ever remember my grandpa telling me (and he told a lot of stories) that had anything to do with religion, was about a time in the early 60s when he kicked a pushy Mormon coworker out of his car.

There were a lot of people to come to his funeral and I feel sick to think that even 1 of them walked away thinking my grandpa did the things he did because of a desire to get to heaven, or because his heart was filled with the love of Jesus.

I have to thank the minister in one regard, though… between his schlock, people who actually knew my grandpa: friends, family, stood up and said some beautiful and touching things. And I cried. A lot. But then the fancy suited, white-toothed reverend would stand up and yay, here we go, walking again through the valley of death… Tears gone!

It was a really tough day for all of us. It’s just unfortunate to know how disappointed he would have been with the whole situation.

This minister met my grandpa on just a few occasions after he went into the hospital for the last time, yet he was the one who was able to speak at the service without his voice cracking because he truly knew the least about my grandpa. And what do people do when they don’t know what they’re talking about? Fill it in with bullshit they do know about and hope it applies.

I’m glad my grandpa wasn’t there to see any of it.

So thanks again for sharing.

I’m reminded of this post from April.
The problem isn’t with the priest, but instead with the person who asked him to come and speak. If you ask a priest to speak at such an event, you shouldn’t be surprised when they talk about religion.
That being said, it happened at the wake, not the funeral, and wakes generally aren’t structured affairs. Anybody who wants to can speak and reflect on the deceased; there isn’t usually a formal schedule. Obituaries in my neck of the woods tend to list times for both the wake and funeral service, so there’s a slim chance he may have invited himself (although Hanlon’s razor would suggest otherwise).

And @Richard Wade, I disagree with your last paragraph – “Ironically, in the end the service still wasn’t that much about his friend. It was more about Tony Danza. Just look at the wording of the headline of this post.” What was *newsworthy* about the service was Tony Danza and his actions, and that’s what attracted Hemant’s attention to the story. If it weren’t for this, would Philip Carlo’s wake and funeral have made it into the New York Post, or onto this blog? Or what if it were John Doe off the street, instead of Tony Danza, who called out the priest – it may have showed up here, but probably not in the papers.
(The majority of a typical Dover school board meeting in 2005 wasn’t about creationism (to start with, at least), but the bit that was is what made them newsworthy.)

Good for Tony! Priests may feel that because the service is on their turf they have the right to rant on and on about Jesus, Heaven and all of that malarkey but the considerate thing to do would be to speak with the family ahead of time to set the ground rules and expectations for the service. Even still, the shift of focus off of the deceased is just cold.

I just have a need to share this here. So please bear with me.

A friend and coworker of mine passed away, and I attended her funeral, along with 95% of the store (Walmart) where she was a people greeter. She was a fiercely religious Irish Catholic, so that is the type of funeral her husband decided to have At her own church. As funeral Masses go, I guess it was a good one. They celebrated her faith, they celebrated God, and they even had the sharing of the bread and wine. But it didn’t remind me of her at all.

The woman I knew would cuss up a storm if you said anything about her (Philadelphia) Eagles. She would tell you all the time about how she was walking weird and her husband’s back was sore from the night before. She could make a sailor and trucker blush and run away. She was the most loving woman I have met, and always had a piece of gum for anyone who wanted it. Juicy Fruit. She was a non conformist who worked in construction as a riveter before women were accepted in the workplace.

Those of us who worked with her either wore green or an Eagles Jersey to her funeral, and we wore green ribbons at work. We made up the majority of the guests at her funeral, infact, I think I counted five other people there, not including family.

After the funeral, most of us spent about an hour and a half in the parking lot of the church remembering her with her family, talking about all the good times we had with her. Her family members were so relieved that we wore green/Eagles stuff. They also agreed that THIS was how she should have been remembered. But we ALL said the same thing. The funeral was more for her husband than for the rest of us, so we allowed him to have the service the way he wanted it.

Funeral services might not be what YOU would have them be, but they are the way they are for a reason. It sounds to me that the funeral in question (with Danza) was not well planned out or thought, kind of hastily put together. In that case, yes, I think he was right for taking over the service and remembering his friend in that way. In the case of my friend, the rigidity, Holiness, and Catholicness (is that a word?) is what the husband needed and wanted.

This is why I never invite clergy to any event! lol

The Tillman clip is great. They are heroes on many different levels.

My wedding, back in 1989 was conducted by a Justice of the Peace. We instructed her to leave out the religious nonsense…… and she did a great job.

When I die, there will be absolutely no church, no clergy, and no prayers, or hymns. My family knows exactly how I feel about the subject.

Licensed Funeral Director here-

In my state, families tell me which clergyperson/speaker they want to officiate, and if they have no ties to one, I have a small list of various religious/non religious folk who I can call, however, unless they’re Catholic, every one of these officiants meets with the family ahead of time to discuss their expectations.
However, once that person gets up and starts talking, everyone is forced to listen to them out of politeness, even if they perform an altar call or try to “save” everyone…and I’ve seen a few of them do it. None of these types are on my list.
Kudos to Tony for speaking up, I’m tired of watching a group of people suffer through something they didn’t want.

At my funeral, I want everyone to wear crazy outfits, dance, and get drunk. Seriously. 🙂

whoa. Hemant, you just made me respect… Tony Danza! wow, i never thought that was even possible. heh.

sorry for your loss, Tony. way to stand up for your friend! i hope i have one like you at my funeral, if some fool comes to speak mythology over my grave. way to man up.

my recent funeral experience: my younger cousin, who killed himself. but not really; it’s a long story and i won’t bore you. anyway, for his mother’s sake they invited a religious to speak at his funeral, as one of the (several) speakers. i am so proud of my family! this dude wasn’t first, and he wasn’t the most important, and the only religious thing he said was that “god is our mother and our father” and the rest of what he had to say? all about my cousin and his, um, ways with the women. which was true; my cousin was a Dawg (but the good kind all the honies loved).

bring the religious to heel, i say. they need *us* not the other way around. if they don’t please the community, they don’t eat. it’s really that simple. i won’t argue that they don’t “serve a purpose,” perhaps they do. but they should conform to our will, what we want and need from them, when the “time comes.” trust me: they are more afraid of losing their particular franchise to World of Warcraft, than they are all the other shit they prattle on and on about, constantly.

don’t fear them. in truth, they are Weak. it’s why they go into ‘the business.’

When my uncle died last 2008, the funeral service was attended by a Catholic priest who was good friends with our family.

I was relieved when the guy (Fr. Ramirez) kept the eulogy short, and talked about his friendship with my uncle, and how he lived well and with dignity.

The service was bittersweet – several relatives I hadn’t seen in years were there, but they were talking about their happier times with my uncle, with the priest wrapping up the service by preaching about living one’s life to the fullest given how fragile a life can be, and about the message “Love one another.”

Barely any utterance of God or the bible during the whole affair.

I still detest the RCC as a whole.

But in Fr. Ramirez’s case, who turned one of the saddest moments of my family’s life into a point of insight and gentle assurance, I think I can make an exception.

I think it was a right on move!

a. He was a close friend and it vaguely sounds like he was trying to help the widow plan it. She seems grateful for his intervention.

b. As someone said above, allow leniency for the grief talking. Whatever happened to that? There used to be a time when outbursts of this nature were shrugged off and immediately forgiven with an it’s the grief talking. Frankly, that needs to be brought back. We are not ourselves when we are stunned with the death of a loved one, even when it’s expected, much more so when it’s not. Have we become such a perfectly perfect and judgmental society that someone can’t be forgiven for being beside themselves with grief now?

c. We are not ourselves when we are stunned with the death of a loved one. Hence, planned or not (and I don’t know in this case), so-called planning consists largely of following someone’s recommendation and nodding your head numbly and going that would be nice when you only half heard them.

I think it’s great that now two celebrities have spoken up and objected. I would hope attendees who are on the peripheal and where the deceased’s family is religious wouldn’t make such outbursts but I think it’s more than about time those who are closest to the deceased or where the deceased was irreligious (regardless of whether their family was or not) did stand up and put a stop to preaching nonsense at their funerals.

It is incredibly disrespectful to the deceased, in that case, to use their funeral to save souls and they should be called out on it. Albeit, I do like what someone said above about just standing up and saying excuse me, everyone but, in honor of her memory, I’d like to point out that grandma didn’t believe in God. That is such a tactful, classy way to do it if one has the presence of mind to.

Cudos to both Danza and Tillman. Hope more and more people absolutely do this. I’m glad there’s been two so publicized so people know that yes they can break that unspoken taboo and say stop disrespecting my loved one.

I certainly hope if a funeral director or something tries to do so, my daughter and/or my grandson have the guts to interrupt and stop them dead in their tracks. Even if they ever (FSM forbid) turn to god, I would hope they still would — to honor my memory and who I was.

I had no idea it was possible to respect Tony Danza, but there you have it. Good for him. Etiquette-wise, maybe it was a dick move, but then again, his friend’s widow approved of his actions. I’d have applauded had I been there – I absolutely cannot stand how some priests will co-opt someone’s funeral as a “product pitch” moment.

Since we’re sharing funeral stories, I’ll throw one in as well, and I hope you’ll bear with me because even though this is over a decade old, it still infuriates me because it was my dad’s. My father’s wake (the night before the funeral/burial service) was actually a double-whammy: pitching for Jesus & the RCC AND harping on ethnic identity. Both my parents were Filipino – my mom died a few years before my dad and he remarried about a year and a half after she died, only to die 8 months later after the remarriage. I was 14 when he died and my stepmom is also Filipino. Both of my parents had been rather lapsed Christians (mom from a Protestant family and dad from a Catholic one) but we never really went to church outside of holidays/when family visited. Neither were they really into defining their social circle based on shared ethnicity. The stepmom, however, was a “church every Sunday because it wouldn’t look right if we didn’t go” kind of attendee and she was REALLY into the whole “Filipino majority” social scene (lots of upperclass as well). So dad went to mass after they started dating, but mostly to make her happy – he never had a “come to Jesus” moment.
And yet, there was the Catholic priest (also a Filipino guy) my stepmom had arranged to speak at the wake, commiting a duel offense of exhorting the joys of finding Jesus and belonging to the Catholic church, AND pointing out how faith in Jesus and the RCC was a particular strength of being Filipino. He also went on a vein about how non-Filipinos were often “taken aback” by the typically “dramatic emotional behavior” exhibited by Filipinos at funerals, but what “those people” didn’t understand was that “Filipinos are naturally VERY emotional people” and were just naturally demonstrating both their grief at the loss of the deceased and their joy that the deceased could now truly experience the love of Jesus and the Holy Father. Had my father been a friend of this priest or a religious man who put a lot of stock in ethnic identity, I’d have been personally disgusted but not too upset on my dad’s behalf. As it was, I was livid. At least there were a good number of my father’s closest friends who got up after that embarassing circus show to talk about who my dad really was, including an Iraqi Muslim, an Indian Hindu a Japanese Buddhist. They talked about his horribly corny and often dirty jokes, how he loved his vodka martinis and playing jazz on the piano, his obsession with books and sci-fi, what a ladies’ man he’d been, how he could have been a fantastic WWII historian if he hadn’t been a doctor… I took far more comfort from their obvious love and respect for my dad than I could have ever had from this stranger priest’s screed on how “wonderful” it was to be a Catholic Filipino. I hate the idea that anyone at the funeral might have taken that priest’s presence there to be a reflection of who my dad was.

And I got to hear him do it again the next day at the actual funeral service, but I guess that was more expected because it took place in the church and burial services tend to be more “ceremonial” anyway.

I wish I had the courage to do what Danza had done and read that priest the riot act, even if it was after he’d finished his screed at the wake. As it was, the best I could manage was rudely refusing to shake his hand and muttered something about how yes, he would see me at mass on Sunday, but only because my stepmom insisted I come if I didn’t want to be grounded, and I wouldn’t take communion because I wasn’t Catholic and would never convert because I was finding Buddhism and Wicca to be more appealing anyway (ah to be a teenager fascinated with non-Christian religions). He said he’d “pray for me.” At least my stepmom was mortified.

One of my best friends died when I was still a teenager. The Pentecostal preacher doing the service went on and on about how women, starting with Eve, were the reason for the world’s evil. He then talked about a couple of things found in my friends wallet that were religious in nature. This was really all he knew about my friend, or perhaps he thought they were the only things important now that he was dead. He assumed that since he carried these things, one of which was a bible verse on a card, that he was a deeply religious person. I never knew my friend to care about religion. Never mentioned god, definitely didn’t lead a Pentecostal lifestyle. But he was a good person. Everybody liked him. To imagine the person he was, think Ferris Bueller. It bothered me that the preacher painted him as a Christian, that shared these sexist misguided beliefs that his church held. I wanted everyone to know how kind and fun he was, how much he loved life, how my life was a better one for him being on the earth even for a short 18 years. Being terrified of public speaking I said nothing, but now that I’m remembering this again, I wish so badly that I had the courage Mr. Danza had.

Wow, this reminds me of the funeral of a good work friend I attended earlier this year. The father just finished speaking about how he just lost his second son, which was sad, and saying how much he will miss him and what he lost, and then the priest comes up and starts talking about God’s loss being more painful than the fathers (correct me if I am wrong, but I thought according to Christianity, they join God when they die… so God didn’t lose anything… confusing none the less)… Anyways, then he turned it into a whole advertisement for Christianity, it made me physically ill listening to him.

Now I completely believe in what Tony did, and if it was a closer friend or family member I have known for longer or spent time outside of work, I would probably have done the same thing.

I agree with the point some people have already made: if you don’t want any religion in your funeral, don’t let your family hold it at a place of worship or be led by clergy. And on the other end, if you’re at a funeral in a place of worship, you should be expecting the fact that there will be religious themes in the service. I wasn’t at Carlo’s funeral, so I can’t speak for this exact situation (maybe what the priest said was inappropriate for the situation,) but as a general rule, I think it’s silly to be angry that a Catholic funeral has Catholic themes.

This is the problem with all the non-practicing Catholicism of the Northeast US. I grew up there, I know.

The priest at my father’s funeral took the opportunity to say how “we Catholics” are so lucky at such a time because “we” have faith. “I don’t know what those atheists do”, he said. My fellow atheist nephew and I just looked at each other, both stunned and pissed. I still regret not saying something to the dick afterwards, but I wasn’t exactly in a confrontational mood given the nature of the event. I now realize that made what he did even more of a dick move, saying such a thing to a mixed audience of mourners and pretending that they were all Catholic just because we were in a Catholic church.