Dear Editor: Will George Weigel never tire of his quest to prove the superiority of his personal preferences over those he chooses to call the “unchurched,” but also those of many of the Christian — and Jewish — faithful? In his column on “composting,” (“On the Composting of Thee and Me,” May 11) he makes sport of anyone who has the temerity to hold that our human bodies are but “microbes on a grain of dust,” despite the fact that the Church has proclaimed exactly that on every Ash Wednesday since time out of mind.

I have witnessed the fact that, in Mr. Weigel’s ancestral country, Germany, as well as in France and other Catholic countries, the bones of the dead are disinterred after 25 or 30 years to make way for more recent burials — presumably to be commemorated by still-living mourners — and deposited into charnel houses or catacombs with little ceremony or monuments. Although our orthodox and conservative Jewish brethren still do not permit cremations, as we do, they nonetheless forbid embalming, and in many cases, drill holes in their coffins before burial to ensure the decomposition of the remains into the environment. Is that, I ask, not also a “biblical view of things”?

Once again, we stand condemned for violating a tradition, or an interpretation, that is not dogma, however deeply and sincerely it may be held.

Edward R. Dorney

Park Slope