A WIDOW has been granted permission to exhume the cremated stays of her late husband’s first wife to make room for his body to be buried in the identical grave.
A school, which the Area Dean didn’t support, was granted by the Consistory Court of the diocese of Oxford to allow the temporary exhumation of cremated stays in a grave within the churchyard of St Michael the Archangel, Warfield, so as to facilitate an extra burial in the identical grave, and for the exhumed stays to be reburied immediately in the identical grave.
The petitioner, Gisela Brownscombe, wished to inter the body of her late husband, John, within the grave of his first wife, Sandra, who had died in April 1998 and been buried within the churchyard of St Michael the Archangel, a Grade II* listed rural church. The cremated stays of Sandra’s mother, Florence Mitchell, who died in August 2005, had also been buried in the identical grave.
But there was insufficient space throughout the grave to accommodate Mr Brownscombe’s stays without first exhuming Mrs Mitchell’s cremated stays after which reburying them in the identical grave immediately after Mr Brownscombe’s burial.
The Area Dean of Bracknell, who was acting as “the minister” during a emptiness within the parish, didn’t support Mrs Brownscombe’s petition for a college to exhume and rebury Mrs Mitchell’s stays. He said that there have been no sufficient grounds for the exhumation since there was no suggestion of a mistake in the unique interment, nor any significant latest pastoral considerations that met the edge of outstanding circumstances.
He said that the argument that the exhumation was temporary and followed by immediate reinterment didn’t circumvent the theological presumption of permanence in Christian burial. Previous rulings had made clear, the Area Dean said, that the presumption existed “precisely to uphold the integrity of burial as a final resting place, and to withstand the incremental erosion of that principle over time”.
Just a few days before Mr Brownscombe’s funeral was as a consequence of happen, attended by members of the family from abroad, Mrs Brownscombe presented an urgent petition to the Consistory Court for a college permitting the temporary exhumation of Mrs Mitchell’s stays.
The diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful Judge David Hodge KC, said that the facts of this case were sufficient to pass the high threshold for the grant of exhumation faculty approval. He doubted “whether the rigours of the same old inhibition against exhumation [had] any application to a case, corresponding to the current, of temporary exhumation carried out solely so as to facilitate an extra burial in the identical grave, with the exhumed stays being returned immediately to the identical grave from which they were exhumed”.
But, if he was mistaken on that, the Chancellor said that he considered that the petitioner’s want to honour her late husband’s desire to be laid to rest in the present grave of his first wife founded the mandatory jurisdiction within the court to order the exhumation of Mrs Mitchell’s human stays.
There were special aspects that were sufficient to make this case an exception to the conventional rule that the committal of Mrs Mitchell’s stays to consecrated ground needs to be treated as everlasting. The exhumation can be temporary, with the cremated stays being returned almost immediately to their present resting place. Any encroachment upon the norm of the permanence of Christian burial can be entirely ephemeral.
The Chancellor said that there was nothing, on the bizarre facts of this case, that would possibly suggest that any undesirable precedent was, or was vulnerable to, being created.
The faculty was granted subject to certain conditions. The exhumation needed to be undertaken immediately before Mr Brownscombe’s burial in accordance with the tactic statement provided by the gravediggers. So far as possible, any coffin or other receptacle containing Mrs Mitchell’s ashes was to be kept out of sight of the mourners attending the funeral. At all times, Mrs Mitchell’s cremated stays have to be treated with all due care, decency, dignity, and respect, and reinterred in the identical grave immediately after the mourners had left after Mr Brownscombe’s burial.
