November is a month dedicated to prayer for the faithful departed. Catholics can receive a plenary indulgence, applicable only to the Holy Souls, under the usual conditions, for visiting a cemetery between November 1 and 8 and praying for the deceased.
That said, why are there Catholic cemeteries?
You might say, “Why ask that? People need a place to bury the dead!”
Well, is the purpose of a Catholic cemetery merely utilitarian, just a practical purpose about where to put the dead? Practical things go out of style. When I bought an IBM Selectric typewriter in 1987, I was top-of-line. Ask my sixteen-year-old what a “typewriter” is.
And, once upon a time, things were in style: front porches, for example. As a kid growing up in the 1960s, people along my street still came out after supper to sit on the porch and talk. Now, how many people have a front porch, and how many know their neighbors?
Catholic cemeteries are neither just utilitarian places to put the dead nor momentarily stylish fads, even if we see fewer and fewer of them. (Part of the reason for the latter is that cemeteries, once the province of parishes, have been largely taken over and centralized by dioceses.)
So what’s so important about why we need Catholic cemeteries? Three reasons:
1. Memento mori. Remember death! Death is inevitable, even more inescapable than the IRS. That said, people have always tried to put it out of mind—and death is increasingly out of sight. With people dying in hospitals, fewer and fewer people have personal experience of being at a deathbed. Funerals and funerary customs have grown attenuated: where is the legendary Irish wake of yesteryear? Mourning has become extremely privatized, largely confined to next of kin. And in the struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death,” as St. John Paul II put it, part of the latter’s ability to advance has been its clandestine nature: lots of people may think death is a “solution” (consider support for abortion and euthanasia), but few actually want to see it.
Catholic cemeteries remind people that death is a part of fallen man’s life. It is the one appointment every man has, not subject to cancelation. Our “planned urban environments” have tended to parcel out pieces of life to distinct areas: live here, work there, shop over here, be buried way over there.
It wasn’t always like that (especially when there were parish cemeteries). One parish cemetery was four blocks from my house. I passed it every time I went to school, every time we drove to the main street heading into or out of town, every time I walked up to the bus stop. We won’t even talk about the day when “churchyards” were adjacent to the church (as was the case in the seventeenth-century Episcopalian parish in my hometown). All that made death a part of life.
2. Communio sanctorum. Parish churchyards and even parish cemeteries reminded people of the “communion of saints.” When people had to pass through the churchyard on the way to church, they were visibly reminded that the “parish community” is not just limited to here and now because the Church is not limited to here and now. The Church encompasses us and “those who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith”—i.e., the Church Suffering (those in purgatory) and the Church Triumphant (those in heaven). Cemeteries remind us that our faith tells us that our relationship with God (and, therefore, our relationship with those whom we have loved) is “changed, not ended” by the grave.
It’s also why the Church has always promoted Catholic cemeteries. The University of Mississippi published a book back in 2020, studying why people chose what the editors called “segregated” cemeteries (e.g., primarily religious but also racial or ethnic) rather than communal graveyards. In the case of Catholics, the answer is simple: since we believe that salvation is not a solo sport, but part of belonging to a community, the Church community—those who have shared faith in Christ’s death in the hope of resurrection—should “stick together.” A Catholic cemetery is a communal affirmation of that faith, expressed post-mortem by its assembling of the faithful.
And because human beings are physical and sensory creatures, they need to see reminders of those realities. They need to see a coffin, a grave, a tombstone. Sorry, but an urn of ashes just does not make the reality of death, the resurrection of the body, and the continuity of life impactful on human beings, which means they lose sight of the continuity of life amid the reality of death.
3. The “democracy of the dead.” That’s a tricky term. Death is “democratic” in the sense that no one can evade it. But Chesterton called “tradition” the “democracy of the dead” because, in honoring what we have received, we recognize that we have not come out of nowhere, but owe much of what we have to those who preceded us.
I would expand that concept. A Catholic cemetery (with more graves than columbarium niches) reminds us that we owe the deceased not just gratitude for what we inherited from them, but space. Space is a basic characteristic of every physical human being. By space, we claim something that—at least at that moment—is ours. It recognizes that a human’s claim to the “dust of the earth” (or, as Leo Tolstoy put it, the land a man needs) is not extinguished when he closes his eyes for the last time. By space, we recognize that what remains of those faithful—their remains—still deserves reverence and honor until they disappear themselves. They have value. It recognizes that a man’s body is not just a useful tool that becomes a problematic waste product with death.
A Catholic cemetery bears witness to these truths.