The authors argued that death competence, defined as specialized skill in tolerating and managing clients' problems related to dying, death, and bereavement, is a necessary prerequisite for ethical practice in grief counseling. A selected review of the literature tracing the underpinnings of this concept reveals how a robust construct of death competence evolved. Using the vehicle of a case study, the authors analyzed an example of empathic failure resulting from an apparent lack of death competence on the part of a mental health provider to illustrate the importance of this characteristic in delivering clinically effective and ethically sensitive grief counseling.

Using an assessment battery of psychological tests and clinical interview, 139 aspirants to the Permanent Diaconate in the Roman Catholic Church were evaluated as part of a screening process to determine who would be selected for a training program leading to ordination. This retrospective study was conducted to develop a systematic psychological description of those candidates deemed acceptable for training. Review of archival records identified differences between those aspirants accepted for training versus those not accepted on 13 key dimensions: MMPI-2 Factor 1-Anxious Distress; MMPI-2 Factor 2-Addiction/Acting Out; three scales of the Millon Index of Personality Styles (MIPS), Pain-Avoiding, Self-Indulging and Clinical Adjustment Index; marital satisfaction; education level; occupational stability; occupational satisfaction; service motivation; handling a hypothetical parish dilemma; DSM-IV-TR Axis I diagnosis and Axis II disorder/traits. Implications of how such a descriptive profile could be applied in future screening and selection of clergy candidates are discussed.

Seventy-four mourners were studied on how their experiences with funeral services for their loved ones influenced later scores on the Grief Experience Inventory (GEI). Those who found the funeral "comforting" and/or participated in planning the funeral reported less grief misery later. A high incidence (43%) of "adverse events" was found to occur during the funerals, contributing, for some mourners, to a perception of the funeral as "not comforting." Adverse events are categorized and illustrated by the authors to aid grief therapists and funeral directors in assisting mourners to be vigilant toward such adversities and to optimize the healing potential of funeral rituals.Centuries of conventional wisdom suggest that bereaved individuals benefit from attending funeral services or similar rites of passage when a loved one dies. Besides the burial or disposition of human remains, Fulton (1995) has argued that funerals serve important psychological functions of separation and integration. Separation functions are those which acknowledge that death has occurred and that the deceased OMEGA, Vol. 41(2) 79-92, 2000 79