Religion: The Right to Rites

When Colette died (TIME, Aug. 16), all France seemed to mourn. Within two hours, 10,000 Parisians gathered silently in the garden of the Palais-Royal beneath the novelist's windows; four days later she was buried with a state funeral. But the Roman Catholic Church denied her its rites. At 81, Novelist Colette—whose books were far from other-worldly—had been twice divorced, was long out of communion with the church. Last week, in the weekly Figaro Littéraire, British Novelist Graham (The End of the Affair) Greene, a Roman Catholic convert, took Paris' Cardinal Archbishop Feltin to task for his decision. Wrote Greene:

"It is the...