Alumni
may soon be able to spend eternity at Notre Dame with the blessing
of the University.
Stories are legion of people trying to sprinkle their loved
ones' ashes on the football field, in the woods around the lakes,
and elsewhere on campus. Such actions violate Catholic doctrine,
which requires treating cremated remains with the same reverence
as a full body. Ashes are supposed to be buried or inurned in
a niche.
It hasn't been possible for alumni to be properly laid to rest
at Notre Dame because the Holy Cross Community Cemetery, above
Saint Mary's Lake, takes only CSC priests and religious brothers.
And graves in Cedar Grove, the shady cemetery on Notre Dame Avenue
south of the Morris Inn, have been available for purchase only
by current and retired Notre Dame faculty and staff.
Now the University is considering opening up Cedar Grove to
alumni. An open-air garden mausoleum at the west end would feature
vaults for bodies and niches for cremated remains. And a Columbarium
Walk, running from the cemetery's All Soul's Chapel westward,
would be flanked by benches and sections of a low wall with niches
for cremated remains.
The vaults and niches would be available for sale to alumni.
In-ground burial in Cedar Grove will continue to be limited to
purchase by faculty and staff.
Another proposed change would create a memorial walkway running
from Notre Dame Avenue back to the entrance of the chapel. This
path would be paved with bricks that alumni could purchase and
have engraved with the name of an alumnus buried somewhere else.
In this way the person could be memorialized at Notre Dame.
These plans are not definite, and no prices have been set. Administrators
are in the process of surveying alumni to gauge interest. But
if strong enough demand is found to exist, the first stage could
commence as early as this fall.
The project has been dubbed "Coming Home" because fewer people
than in the past remain in the city where they were born and raised,
but many Notre Dame alumni reunite on campus with family and friends
for weddings, baptisms, reunions and, of course, football games.
"It is the one place some have in common after the family home,"
writes Alumni Chaplain Father Bill Seetch, CSC, '74, '78M.Div.
in the letter accompanying the alumni survey. "That it would be
the desired spot to be laid to rest is no surprise. For many of
us this side of heaven, Notre Dame is home."
The University's interest in redeveloping Cedar Grove was driven
not only by alumni interest in being laid to rest there and growing
interest in cremation but because Cedar Grove is running out of
room. At the present rate of grave purchases, the cemetery is
expected to be full in 65 years.
In addition to the new above-ground memorials, longer-term plans
call for removing some access roads through the grounds and moving
maintenance facilities to the southwest corner. Those changes
would create space for additional faculty and staff burials. More
than 10,000 people are already buried in Cedar Grove.
Taken together, the open-air mausoleum, Columbarium Walk and
a noncontiguous niche "fence" envisioned at some future date for
along the northern border would have a total capacity of 1,750
vaults and 3,200 niches.
Cedar Grove Cemetery was laid out in 1838, four years before
the University's founding, by Father Benjamin Petit, the third
Catholic priest dispatched to preach to the Potawatomie Indians
on the northern Indiana frontier. He died the following year,
at age 27, while on his way back from accompanying the Indians
on the notorious Trail of Death, their forced removal to a reservation
in Kansas. Petit's remains lie not in Cedar Grove but beneath
the Log Chapel.
For more information on Coming Home, visit the website http://cominghome.nd.edu,
contact project director Allison Heuring at 574-631 5660, or email
cominghome@nd.edu.
(Aril 2005)
