Sacrilege and English graveyards

[bluesqueak]

Catlady writes:
> Can a Catholic answer if Catholics are bured in consecrated ground? 
> Can an Anglican (Little Hangleton has been decided to be in England 
> not Scotland) answer if Anglicans are buried in consecrated 
> ground?


I'm an Anglican who received primary education in a Roman Catholic 
convent school, so I would feel safe in saying that the chances of 
any convent agreeing to have their nuns buried in unconsecrated 
ground is non-existent (which is the example Pam quoted previously).

Archaeologists in England are sometimes given licences to work in 
areas which are no longer consecrated - if they find bodies which 
appear to have received Christian burial  they must remove them in a 
respectful manner (including putting up screens so passers-by can't 
gawp), may  do a limited amount of research on the bodies, but must 
ultimately pass them on to religious authorities for re-burial in 
consecrated ground. 

If a churchyard is completely de-consecrated there is usually an 
attempt to find any bodies that haven't completely crumbled to dust 
and rebury them in still consecrated ground. I'm not certain, but I 
think you're not allowed to de-consecrate or do any building on 
consecrated burial grounds for quite a number of years after its last 
recorded burial - certainly I would expect that if the Little 
Hangleton graveyard had been de-consecrated, then bodies (like the 
Riddles) given Christian burial in it as recently as 50 years ago 
would have been removed to consecrated ground.

We do frequently use old graveyards for secular use, and even build 
on them; Britain is an incredibly small, crowded, *old* country, and 
it's difficult to find any space for building on that hasn't been 
used, reused, and then used again. But a lot of old church graveyards 
are closed simply because burying anyone else there would mean having 
to disturb previous burials. They are not actually de-consecrated.

Burial space in general is hard to find - cremation following an 
Anglican funeral service is extremely popular amongst modern British 
Anglicans. No-one would insist that the ashes then *had* to be 
scattered or interred in or on consecrated ground, but it is an 
option. 

Leisure usage that doesn't involve disturbing or digging up graves 
has been permitted in English churchyards since time immemorial - our 
local churchyard, previously used as a graveyard and which is still 
used for the internment of ashes, is also used by people walking 
their dogs, for our church fetes, for barbeques (with permission), by 
local kids to play football in - and no-one would dream of batting an 
eyelid. There just isn't that much open space in East London. Denying 
people the right to use the open space around the church would 
actually be seen as un-Christian by the congregation. It's when 
people *damage* things that we start to talk about 'sacrilege'.

And the ceremony in the GoF graveyard scene would provoke very large 
howls of 'sacrilege' if Voldemort performed it in my local 
churchyard - probably from quite a lot of people who've never set 
foot inside the actual church.

Pip (finally de-lurking on OT chatter - hi!)