The Metropolitan of Piraeus, His Eminence Seraphim, this week echoed other hierarchs in Greece and called on Orthodox clerics not to officiate at funeral or memorial services in cases where the deceased has selected cremation instead of burial. Seraphim, in fact, issued an encyclical to clerics in his diocese, on the occasion of the operation of the first crematorium in Greece, calling the practice of cremation “… an iconoclastic act that insults the faith of the Church for eternity … an act of violence against the body”.