The Catholic Church does not justify giving him a Catholic funeral. Local Catholic functionaries(including the Cardinal) justify anything at all for the Rightful King. Then again, we do not know the state of his soul the moment before death. He may well have sincerely repented of all his Cardinal Sins in that last moment. That faint possibility certainly does not justify a eulogy that pretends that he is already in Heaven. A funeral mass should not contain such a eulogy from a priest, even for someone who has led an apparently saintly life because we really do not know the state of the deceased’s soul at the moment of death. A funeral mass should be a funeral mass with no praise or excoriation of the dead.
Even back in Cardinal Cushing’s day I thought that Boston Catholicism was about as saintly as Boston politics.
I see nothing at all has changed.