THE Consistory Court of the diocese of Norwich has granted a petition for a college to exhume the stays of a stillborn baby buried within the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Ormesby, greater than ten years ago. The baby had been buried in a small blue casket within the grave of his paternal grandfather.
Since then, the infant’s parents had separated after what they each described as a relationship that was “abusive” and “toxic”. The mother applied for the school to exhume and either cremate or rebury the infant’s stays within the churchyard of St Michael’s, Ormesby.
The ground on which she applied for the school was that she suffered medical harm by means of distress and psychological harm when visiting the grave, including nightmares and flashbacks. The court accepted that there was a transparent link between the reliable medical evidence provided concerning the mother’s condition, and the placement of the grave, and that that provided grounds for making an exception to the rule as to the permanence of Christian burial.
The baby’s father consented to the mother’s petition, subject to his knowing where the infant was to be reburied. The mother was unhappy that the daddy would know where the infant was to be reburied, however the Chancellor, the Worshipful Jacqueline Humphreys, said that not only did the daddy “have a right to know where his child was buried, the record of burials in a churchyard [was] public information” and was “not information that could be kept secret from anyone”.
The mother asked that the infant’s stays, once exhumed, be cremated, and a service of remembrance be held. She didn’t indicate what she would plan to do with the cremated stays thereafter, and the implication was that they’d not be reburied anywhere, but relatively could be retained by the mother. In the choice the petition asked for reburial at St Michael’s churchyard.
The Chancellor said that the law didn’t permit the infant’s stays, which had been “buried in consecrated ground over ten years ago to now be cremated after which left unburied”. Burial of human stays in consecrated ground carried an intention of permanence, and exhumation was the exception.
Generally, reburial of those stays in other consecrated ground was required in order that permanence was also intended in the brand new location. Only rarely was exhumation permitted for reburial in unconsecrated ground, but reburial somewhere was almost all the time required. There was nothing within the circumstances of this case, the Chancellor said, to suggest that reburial was not appropriate.
The mother’s petition was granted, and it was required that the infant’s stays be reburied at St Michael’s, on the direction of the minister of that church. It was a condition of that, that the named undertakers should exhume the stays of the infant and retain them of their possession in any respect times until they were reverently and discreetly reburied within the churchyard at St Michael’s as soon as practicable.
Any application for a memorial to the infant to be erected over his grave must either be compliant with the relevant churchyard regulations, and have the consent of each his parents, or they need to be subject to a college application to the Consistory Court.
Due to the sensitive nature of the case the names of the parties were anonymised.
