THE stays of an eight-year-old boy murdered 50 years ago could also be exhumed to be cremated and scattered in accordance with the surviving family’s wishes, so long as this is finished reverently, the Consistory Court of the diocese of Southwark has ruled.
A sister petitioned for a college to exhume, from the consecrated area of Lambeth Cemetery, the stays of her eight-year-old brother, who was brutally murdered greater than 50 years ago.
Their parents were distressed, they usually couldn’t now remember details of how the funeral arrangements were made at the moment. His mother had a memory that the undertakers had explained that a plot in Lambeth Cemetery was being offered to them without payment. That was borne out by the deed that the parents got in respect of the grave. They were unaware, nevertheless, that the plot was consecrated, or what the implications of consecration were.
The terms of the deed stated that the boy’s father was granted the grave space for a term of fifty years, after which it will revert to Lambeth Council for reuse. That term of fifty years was approaching.
The cremated stays of the boy’s grandfather were subsequently buried in the identical grave. The faculty was hunted for his stays to be exhumed, too. It was proposed that the boy’s stays could be cremated and kept at home, along with those of his grandfather. When other family members had died, their cremated stays would even be kept at home, and eventually six sets of cremated stays could be scattered.
If the arrangements that were proposed for the treatment of the stays after exhumation weren’t satisfactory, a college wouldn’t be granted for the exhumation of the stays of the boy and his grandfather.
Cremation was addressed in Canon Law by Canon 38. Although the practice of cremation began in England at the tip of the nineteenth century, and was the topic of laws in 1902, it was not formally considered by the Church of England until 1943. That yr, the Convocation of Canterbury decided that there was no objection to the practice, and that there was much to commend it, provided the safeguards of decency and reverence were exercised.
In 1951, the Convocation of York expressed the identical view concerning the acceptability of cremation. It was more specific, nevertheless, and stated that the ashes of a cremated body must be disposed of in consecrated or dedicated ground by (a) burial, or (b) strewing them reverently on the surface of the bottom and covering them flippantly with earth, or (c) enclosing them, after obtaining the crucial faculty, in an element of the church or other consecrated constructing set apart for the aim.
It said that “to scatter ashes broadcast on either consecrated or unconsecrated ground without covering them is a technique which could also be unseemly or irreverent and can’t be really helpful.”
In the sunshine of the Canon and the 2 resolutions of the Convocations, the recommendation of the Legal Advisory Committee was that “It is illegal for an Anglican minister to scatter (versus strewing) cremated stays as to accomplish that is irreverent.”
The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful Philip Petchey, said that it was apparent that the correctness of the Commission’s view was “entirely depending on whether scattering is or just isn’t reverent”.
The scattering of ashes was not intrinsically irreverent, and the Chancellor was confident that, in due time, the ashes of the boy and of his grandfather would reverently be scattered by their family. But there could possibly be “no absolute security for this”.
It was as well to recollect, the Chancellor said, that “although, obviously, human stays should at all times be treated with reverence, the souls of the individuals whose stays they’re don’t reside inside them. In the words of the psalmist, ashes are but dust.”
Canon 38(4) raised one other matter: namely, the placement of any disposal of ashes. It didn’t envisage the disposal of ashes in any location aside from consecrated ground or land put aside for the disposal of ashes. It was not, nevertheless, an Act of Parliament.
It looked as if it would the Chancellor that it was “addressing what a minister must do, the ashes having been committed into his hands; and quite obviously it’s directed to a primary disposal. . . It could be too narrow a reading to interpret the Canon in order to forbid the disposal of ashes aside from in consecrated ground.”
What the family was saying was that, within the circumstances, the ashes shouldn’t be subject to the results of consecration, nor also to the applying of Canon law. The Chancellor said that, in principle, he thought that the argument was correct, and “Canon law shouldn’t re-impose a restriction that consecration properly considered doesn’t.”
In regard to the terms on which Lambeth Borough Council granted rights within the cemetery, the Chancellor said that it seemed that granting such rights on the premise that such rights had a limited duration cut across the concept of the permanence of Christian burial.
That was not so, the Chancellor said. The stays would remain subject to the protection of the Consistory Court after the expiry of the burial rights granted by Lambeth Council. That reflected what happened in respect of a “traditional” consecrated churchyard, where grave spaces went on getting used over and once again. The stays interred there have been never exhumed, but were displaced as crucial, and appropriately rearranged throughout the churchyard to facilitate ongoing burials.
In a local-authority cemetery, in the same way, grave spaces became available for reuse after the burial right that had been purchased had expired. If a family purchased an extension of the correct, and went on doing so, it never became available for reuse. The expiry of the burial right, nevertheless, didn’t mechanically give Lambeth Borough Council the correct to reuse the grave. Such reuse, often by a process often called “lift and deepen”, was depending on the grant of a college.
