Dignity in death for the tiniest of God’s loved ones

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

For 20 years, a Catholic ministry called CBIB – Compassionate Burials for Indigent Babies – has provided funerals and dignified burials for babies who die through miscarriage, still birth or abortion.

Lise Naccari, the founder of CBIB, was profoundly impacted as a young mother because she herself had suffered a miscarriage. Naccari says burying the tiniest of human beings is an act of obedience to the whisper of God in her heart.

CBIB began in a crisis

She started CBIB in 2002 to help a 19-year-old girl who was pregnant, unmarried and had nowhere else to turn. The teenager’s mother threatened to kick her out of the house unless she aborted her child.

The desperate girl paid $900 in cash because the clinic wouldn’t take a check or credit card. The abortionist stuck a needle into the infant’s heart and sent the teenager home to wait for labor to begin so that the abortion could be completed the next day.

But something went terribly wrong. The woman went into labor and delivered her lifeless baby in a pool of blood. Had it not been for emergency medical personnel who responded to a panicked 911 call, the young woman would have bled to death. She underwent an emergency hysterectomy.

Something beautiful emerged from the carnage. The woman could see that the baby taken from her was beautiful and fully formed, and now the scared mother who had been told her child was nothing more than a blob of tissue wanted to do the right thing.

She wanted to bury her baby, and Lise Naccari stepped in to provide a dignified burial.

Hundreds of burials

In the last 20 years, with the help of the Knights of Columbus and the Legion of Mary and other volunteers, CBIB has laid to rest more than 320 babies, most of them tiny, all of them precious. It gives Lise Naccari conviction and purpose.

On June 29 at St. Anthony of Padua Church in New Orleans, CBIB arranged for a Funeral Mass celebrated by Father Truong Pham for the repose of the souls of five infants who had been miscarried. One of the babies had been kept inside a hospital morgue since 2018.

For more information on CBIB, go to CBIBinc.com. Check out the Clarion Herald video at youtu.be/rD28Pxx7YII.

pfinney@clarionherald.org