Three times in the space of perhaps a minute or two, Bloom's thoughts about death––sudden death, infant death, suicide––bump up against the Catholic orthodoxy of the men riding with him in the funeral carriage. The Christians assume that the ethical issues posed by such deaths must be approached with reverence for divine law. As a freethinking atheist Bloom feels no such restraint. His responses are humanistic, and humane. 

Jack Power's comment about Paddy Dignam sparks an uncomfortable exchange:

      — He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said.
      — The best death, Mr Bloom said.
      Their wide open eyes looked at him.
      — No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.
      No-one spoke.

From a purely experiential perspective it is hard to argue with Bloom's assessment of Dignam's passing: no miserable debility, no protracted agony, no desperate wrestling with anxiety and fear, just a quick cardiac crisis and then blessed release. But from the Catholic perspective these are not really blessings. Suffering is the deserved and beneficial condition of creatures born in a state of mortal sin. It spurs them to repent their transgressions, make confession to a priest, and receive absolution before approaching the judgment seat of the Almighty. Sudden death robs sinners of all opportunity for such atonement, very likely condemning them to an eternity of fiery torment. Astonished stares and disapproving silence greet Bloom's characterization of this nightmare scenario as "The best death."

Moments later a child's coffin is spotted making its way to the cemetery. Martin Cunningham remarks on the sad sight, prompting Bloom to rue the loss of his infant son. But Simon Dedalus retreats into Christian consolation, uttering a familiar religious bromide: "Poor little thing... It's well out of it." The regrettable deaths of children prompt discussion of an even more regrettable kind of death:

     — But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own life.
      Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.
      — The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.
      — Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We must take a charitable view of it.
      — They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.
      — It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.

Cunningham humanely tries to squelch his friends' judgmental comments because he knows that Bloom's father committed suicide. Bloom does not respond to the slurs but he does reflect sadly on the harshness of Catholic teaching: "They have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already."

Christian condemnations of suicide trace back to Augustine, whose early 5th century work The City of God contested the Roman view that self-slaughter can be a noble response to adversity, arguing that, far from showing greatness of spirit, suicide represents a refusal to endure suffering and a violation of the fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." The Catholic church has always endorsed this view, defining it until very recently (1983) as a mortal sin that would result in eternal damnation. Its teaching is based not on the obvious harm that suicide does to loved ones, but on the offense done to God. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologiae is often quoted on the subject, relies on the judgment of Augustine and adds that "whoever takes his own life, sins against God, even as he who kills another's slave, sins against that slave's master... For it belongs to God alone to pronounce sentence of death and life."

The punishment that Bloom notes ("Refuse christian burial") was widespread, longstanding, and viciously retributive. Gifford aptly summarizes the history: "Church councils from the fifth century onward decreed that a suicide could not be buried with Church rites. Medieval law throughout Europe decreed confiscation of the suicide's property, and burial customs traditionally involved indignities to the corpse." Suicides were buried in unconsecrated ground, typically at crossroads on a city's periphery. Interment usually happened at night, and a stake was often driven through the corpse's heart to keep the suicide's ghost from returning to haunt the living. These practices persisted into the 19th century. Gifford notes that "English law (which technically included Ireland) provided for burial in consecrated ground in 1823 and permitted religious services in 1882." It is hard to say exactly how long the old customs may have persisted in Ireland, but it was long enough to fire the imagination of Bram Stoker, who was born in 1847 in Clontarf, not far from one such burial site in Ballybough.

Catholic positions on "infanticide" and abortion––a distinction with no real difference in the church's eyes––deplore the taking of life. But as with suicide the reasons for the ban are absolutist rather than humanistic. When very young children like Bloom's Rudy die of natural causes, church doctrine is content to see them consigned to eternal perdition, on the grounds that unbaptised people cannot enter heaven. For this reason unbaptised infants were sometimes buried in the same crossroads plots reserved for suicides, murderers, and other monstrous malefactors. Subjecting tiny babies to such indignities has troubled many Catholics, inspiring some ingenious theological contortions. In Dante's Divine Comedy unbaptised infants are consigned to Hell but placed in a special circle, Limbo, where the only punishment is being deprived of God's presence––still a very real punishment, since enjoying the sight of God is ultimately the only purpose and value of human existence.

On all these end-of-life issues, Catholic doctrine is based entirely on what church authorities understand to be the will of God, with the result that it often displays "no mercy" toward, and little interest in, mere human feelings. In contrast, Bloom's opinions seem to arise entirely from sympathetic responses to human suffering: physical debility, loss of young children, misery profound enough to make killing oneself seem attractive. His freethinking is most poignant when the inhumanity of doctrinal thinking is most overt: "They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already."

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John Hunt 2023