Dear Editor: Edward Dorney misses the point (“About Human Composting,” Readers’ Forum, July 27).  Weigel defending religious sensibilities such as veneration for the remains of the dead is clearly not motivated by sanctimony towards the secularity that actually is sanctimonious.

Dorney makes a rash claim in comparing Ash Wednesday to the practice of those materialists who go out of their way to demean any importance at all to human remains, insisting that insignificant “microbes on a grain of dust” is “exactly” what the Church teaches, which is what Catholicism, and religious practice in general, really says.

God does not regard the beings he creates in his own image as insignificant “microbes” nor the planetary habitat he created for them as insignificant cosmic “dust”. To an atheist intent on proving the meaninglessness of life, such trivializations are their ritual testament to their secular exhibitionism that life has no “sacredness” at all.  But this is not so for a Catholic.

Neither is a renowned Catholic scholar accountable to Dorney’s non-sequitur arguments about what some of Weigel’s ancestors supposedly did in burial rites.  God’s purposes are never devoid of meaning, including teaching us reverence for the dead through our disciplined and humbling faith.

Kenneth Farley

Boerum Hill