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Texto reemplazado: «<sup>th</sup> century» por «th century»
According to the Roman Ritual, the central act of the obsequies was and continues to be the mass with the body of the deceased in the Church.
During the 19<sup>th</sup> 19th century, a series of civil provisions banned, on hygiene grounds, the corpses from being taken into the church for the obsequies with the corpse present<ref>''Bol.etín Oficial de la Provincia de Vizcaya. ''No. 126. Bilbao, 20 October 1849.</ref>.
In many places, the coffin was placed in the porch before the church door, while the funeral cortege went inside for the Office for the Dead and the funeral mass. At the end of the service, the priest followed by the cortege went out to the porch to administer the absolution of the dead. The cortege then made its way to the cemetery where the burial took place.
== Arrangement of the family mourners in the church ==
The funeral cortege went into the church in the same order as in the procession. During the 20<sup>th</sup> 20th century, a difference has to be made between two clearly different periods regarding the arrangement of the mourners in the church, along with other transition situations down to the present.
The previous period was conditioned by the very layout of the church for religious functions. The benches or tribunes were for men and the chairs were occupied by women at family burials. This period was when the corpse remained in the porch during the obsequies or had been directly taken to the cemetery for burial. The male mourners sat on the bench or benches reserved for this purpose, known as “mourning benches”, which was the last of the row of benches from the presbytery; the mourning benches were subsequently those nearest the alter. In the Basque Country within France, the male mourners took their relevant place in the church’s tribunes; they later sat lower down in the front benches.
