Why are 12% of green burial cemeteries Catholic?

Memorial boulder with name and symbol of cross at Maryrest Cemetery  Photo: Tom Bailey   

We often emphasize the physical aspects of green burial and what it does not do to the environment, but people bury (or cremate) their dead because the body of someone we know and love represents something more to us than simply a physical husk like a pea pod or clam shell.

Last week Brant Huddleston interviewed me for his blog Dance2Death Afterlife. I had sent Brant a copy of The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide: State-by-state where, how and why to choose green burial. Being a good host, he read the book and sent me a list of questions we might address in a podcast. One was:

"It appears most of the religious sites in the guide are Catholic. Why do you think that is?"

Of course I had known there are a number of Catholic green burial grounds but I didn't twig to how large a percentage until I added up the entries in my book: 15 out of 125+ cemeteries, or roughly 12%. Jewish burial is often referred to as approximating green burial; embalming is not generally used, burial is in a plain wooden box that may have holes drilled to speed decomposition through contact with the earth. While a few Jewish cemeteries have opened dedicated natural burial sections, Catholic dioceses across the country are embracing the new movement toward green burial which not only eschews toxic embalming, burial vaults and painted steel caskets but considers the land and the landscape of the cemetery itself and the possibilities for human burial to add value them.

The embracing may be due to the Catholic Church having taken the trouble to square green burial with church doctrine. In an article titled "The Ecology of Burial: Choices reflect belief about life after death"1, Opus Dei Father Paul O'Callaghan, an expert on church teaching about end-of-life questions and a professor at Rome's Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, said burial methods often indicate underlying attitudes about the afterlife.

Christians recognize "in all humility, that the body has to go back to where it came from, it goes back to the earth," said Father O'Callaghan, noting that the words "human" and "humility" both come from the Latin word "humus," meaning earth.

"The authentic Christian practice" is burial "followed by natural decay." The eventual resurrection of the body promised in the Creed will be the "fruit of divine intervention."

After an October 2016 Vatican release of instructions placing severe limits on cremation for Catholics, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, noted that it was appropriate to allow the natural decay of the body while protecting the environment but not to see the body of the deceased primarily as fertilizer for plants and trees.2 

Because burial is important to Catholicism as a symbol of faith in the resurrection and also the dignity of the human body and the integral part it plays in a person's identity, the church considers a natural burial as meeting the Catholic concept of afterdeath care when the funeral rites are observed, including the Rite of Committal, and a memorial includes the deceased's name and the symbol of the cross. 

Andrew Schafer, Director of Catholic Cemeteries for the Archdiocese of Newark, NJ, my own diocese and owner of Maryrest, the first cemetery with green burial I ever visited, said, "For Catholics especially, (natural burial) can be an expression of profound reverence for the body and the sacredness of life, a deep respect for the integrity of creation and God’s good earth, and of course, it emulates the most famous burial of all,” that of Jesus wrapped in a shroud and buried in a rock tomb. 

Modern green burial is still in its infancy but just as the movement has become more concise at defining what it entails in physical terms, its embrace by more people should help define it in terms of spiritual and philosophical as well as environmental terms.

1 http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2017/the-ecology-of-burial-choices-reflect-beliefs-about-life-after-death.cfm 

2 http://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2016/final-resting-place-vatican-releases-instruction-on-burial-cremation.cfmIn

Can more cemeteries offer green burial?

In a recent article in the Kokomo Perspective, two area funeral directors in Kokomo, Indiana who have worked with families on the green burial option say the paucity of local cemeteries that allow it dampens interest. 

“It’s one of those things where if there was a closer option, people would be more interested. Having to go an hour away where your loved one is buried is an obstacle,” said Matt Grecu. “With it being something that hasn’t really taken hold in central Indiana, cemeteries are pretty leery about dedicating and making a commitment to taking a piece of land and saying, ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’ Because once you put one person there and it doesn’t take off, then you’ve got an area of land that isn’t any more accessible to the cemetery.”

Four cemeteries in Indiana offer green/natural burial: Kessler Woods at Washington Park North Cemetery in Indianapolis; Spring Vale in Lafayette; Oak Hill Cemetery in Crawfordsville; and White Oak Cemetery in Bloomington. This is a relatively high density--some states (Wyoming, Rhode Island, Louisiana to name a few) have none--but it still means that few Indianans would consider them local.

I also heard recently from two people trying to get green burial off the ground in their communities who were reaching out for advice/information/advocacy. 

What can be done to make green burial local? It helps to show interest by asking for it when you approach a funeral director, but how many times in your lifetime are you likely to do that? Increasing the number of cemeteries would be more effective. It's really a push me-pull you situation: if you have the cemeteries people are likely to be exposed to the option, and if people are exposed to the option, they are likely to ask for it. And cemeteries, as Grecu says, are more likely to invest in green burial if they know people will use the option.

The Green Burial Council offers an educational sheet called 10 Things You Can Do or Say to Promote Green Burial. Number 5 under starting a green burial cemetery in your community is "Get your state Attorney General to write a letter confirming the legality of dispensing with concrete and plastic vaults." It would seem obvious that cemeteries would know this, but businesses can run on assumption and custom and it's easy to just assume that vaults are required. I would add embalming and burial containers into the equation. Customers need to ask and funeral professionals need to know what is required under law.

Another idea is to help an existing local cemetery cost out a hybrid green burial for their operation. This requires knowing what is involved yourself. The potentially higher cost to consumers of hand-dug graves and other non-mechanized operations is usually offset by eliminating embalming, fancy caskets and vaults. However, as these are areas where funeral directors and cemeteries make money it's important that cemeterians understand they can profit from increasing interest in green burial. It's the way of our country; you can't expect professionals to give away their services when they have lives to support.

If green burial is not to be just a flash in the pan, it needs to really take root. Educate yourself and be prepared to promote green burial when next someone asks what you know about cemeteries and funerals.

Embalming: The "yuck" factor.

Dr. Bunnell's embalming tent: "Free from odor or infection"

A soldier dies on a Civil War battlefield far from home.  Before the battle he bought a ticket to be embalmed. He's one of the lucky dead; he's found and identified and his family wants him back but the trains won't take unembalmed bodies. Using Dr. Thomas Holmes's new pump an embalmer injects fluid containing arsenic to kill microorganisms that cause decay long enough for his body to be transported home for burial and to provide closure to his family, who otherwise would never know for certain whether he died. 

Embalming existed before the Civil War to preserve bodies for medical study. The techniques developed during war were perfected for mass public use and by the mid-twentieth century, most everyone assumed that dead bodies needed to be embalmed to avoid spreading disease and polluting ground water. Formaldehyde-based solutions had replaced the incredibly toxic arsenic. Embalming also satisfied a human need to see and touch someone after they'd died. Although nobody set out to do it, embalming led the living to disconnect from the dead as afterdeath care that now required professionals and equipment moved out of family homes into funeral homes and Americans came to think of an unpreserved body as yucky.

As we try to walk back afterdeath care to achieve green or natural burial, is it necessary to entirely do away with embalming? If this were a newsreel, would we rewind to the point at which funeral homes didn't exist?

Probably not. People should and do have more input into afterdeath care. The afterdeath care field has expanded to include alternative professionals, just as cemeteries have, and many are willing to include families. I'm one of the customers who went green when my father died but chose to leave the personal care up to someone else. It wasn't important that he be viewed after his family saw him dead in the hospital, and the funeral director kept him in the refrigerator. We could still have arranged for him to be viewed. Refrigeration works just fine for preserving a body, as does dry ice, but part of making a body viewable is doing touchup to get rid of the "dead" look and I didn't want makeup. My father wasn't even dressed; he was decently wrapped in his shroud.

The definition of embalming doesn't include the word toxic; it includes words like chemicals and spices and sweetening and preserving. The Green Burial Council certified The Champion Company's Enigma line of "eco-balming" fluids as safe, effective, non-toxic, and non-hazardous both to the environment and, equally important, to the human who does the embalming (formaldehyde is harmful in the workplace). Eco-balming keeps a body preserved for about a week, or the time it generally takes to gather mourners and hold a funeral. (Myth: embalming preserves a human body forever.) Again, for a body to be viewable it also has to be made up and dressed.

My objections to embalming go beyond environmental to the social and emotional texture of death. Continuing to view a dead body as "human" well after death makes it harder to see our mortality as part of a cycle and to take comfort from simple burial directly in the earth in a shroud or biodegradable casket, in the grand idea of the human flesh being recycled into something usable by new life, whether it be blueberry bushes or earth worms, bacteria, beetles or evergreen trees.

When families took care of their dead the knowledge of what to do passed down from generation to generation. We've largely lost that knowledge; a couple years ago I wouldn't even have known what funeral home to call when my father died. The hospital people were incredibly kind but their responsibility ended at his death. I at least knew who to go to next. Because of my work in green burial I had chosen a funeral director who is a green burial advocate and who I could trust to make decisions. I'm glad of that because I was in a state of shock, but I regret not taking more of a hand in the individual steps.

Don't wait until someone dies to talk about what to do with them. There doesn't have to be any "yuck" in death.

NOW AVAILABLE! The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide 2017

It's official! The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide is out. The last months of 2016--checking facts and making corrections, agonizing over cover photos and design, made the book feel like the rock Sisyphus eternally tries to push up the hill. Now the rock is at the top and the guide is available in PDF for purchase and download at greenburialnaturally.org. The complete guide lists over 125 cemeteries across the US in 303 pages. You can also purchase it in one of four regions, Northeast, South, Midwest or West. Each edition contains introductory material on green burial and photo illustrations, and the cemetery listings are color coded with maps to help you find the nearest place; you may have to look across regions for something that suits your needs. More cemeteries are coming on line and once enough are available, they will be added in to a new edition. Canada will be available later this year.

Four years ago I stumbled upon the term "green burial" on the internet. I'd never heard of dead bodies being disposed of without formaldehyde-based embalming or environmentally unfriendly concrete burial vaults, in a shroud or biodegradable casket, using the burial to protect or reclaim forest or meadow, in a cemetery which doesn't use pesticides and heavy equipment for landscape. Where graves may be hidden unmarked in the landscape or marked with just engraved fieldstone memorials. Bodies that are not sealed away recycle their nutrients into the soil and help build new life.

Actually I knew nothing then about burial, green or otherwise. I'd rarely set foot in a cemetery and my first forays were timid and full of unknowns. Gradually a general book formed out of my research that wasn't this guide. It took so much time and effort to track down, contact, and visit a handful of cemeteries in the Northeast where I live that I decided to make it easier for people to get themselves and their loved ones buried green. The guide includes lists of funeral homes that work with green burial customers to make it easier to get help with preparing the body.

I buried my father naturally in Steelmantown Cemetery in New Jersey last summer. I would like to be buried naturally myself.  I hope the guide encourages more and more people to choose the option and more and more cemeteries to go natural so together we can green up the future of burial.

Maryrest, my first green burial cemetery.

Ann at the Saint Francis of Assisi green burial section at Maryrest Cemetery, Mahwah NJ  Photo Credit: Tom Bailey  

Green Burial Naturally did not spring full-blown from my mind. The idea was an afterthought; I'd spent ten years with my husband Tom Bailey traveling on a sailboat, writing and taking photographs for sailing magazines, until in 2010 we returned to the US to try to get my aging parents out of the big house they raised me in and into different housing. As the time home expanded I looked for topics to write about and an internet search on recycling came up with the term "green burial." It was unfamiliar. With nothing else exciting on the horizon I began research.

I'd spent virtually no time in cemeteries of any kind and to get a feel for them we toured a half-dozen conventional cemeteries within easy reach in northern New Jersey then headed for the only nearby green burial cemetery in Mahwah. Maryrest is a Catholic cemetery with a dedicated green burial section. It's a hybrid cemetery because it incorporates both green and conventional burial.

The day was cold and clear. Maryrest's small hillside site is stuffed into a semi-rural community near the Ramapo Mountains. Like many odd-sounding New Jersey town names, Mahwah is a derivation of a Lenape word and means “place where paths meet.” We approached the gate diffidently but when no one challenged us sailed on in. 

Tom and I have now visited a hundred cemeteries but back then I was intimidated. What etiquette should I follow? Walk on graves or not walk on graves? Speak softly? Would people know we didn't belong there?  

My information packet for Maryrest didn’t include a map and as it was Sunday no one was around to answer questions. We followed the cemetery road through manicured lawns filled with orderly rows of polished granite headstones, looking for something that might be green burial. As a Catholic convert I can be buried in a Catholic cemetery. The rows of anonymous stones, curiously uniform in size and close together, called to my anti-class sense but were blah aesthetically. This made the contrast even greater when we stumbled upon the green burial section in a cut-off vale of ground beside a busy highway. On the flat above a quarter-acre of raggedy but pleasing woods was a wooden gazebo with wind chimes playing in the gusty winter wind. We parked on the cemetery road, climbed out into the freezing air and crossed a brown grass strip (natural burial discourages fertilizer or pesticide use by groundskeepers) to look down where falling trees had been left to lie, crisscrossed in a wild tangle.

I felt a breath of magic rush over me. It was a misbegotten place in some ways yet the idea that someone had been recently buried per their instructions in a tangle of anonymous trees rather than under trimmed grass was so antithetical to the rows of grey headstones behind me that I shivered. The wind chimes tinkled. Bird feeders hung empty of seed, the birds gone. A huge truck blatted up Route 287. But people lay below me unmarked and returning to nature. Along the berm we found a few boulders with names inscribed on them that appeared to be markers for the natural burials below. The hair rose on the back of my neck and it wasn’t from the cold. Something different than anything I’d contemplated lay below me.

I found out later that the graves were not in the woods but on the berm but that didn't cut into the sense that we'd stumbled upon something revolutionary; something I wanted for myself. On subsequent visits to Maryrest more names had been carved into the boulders. 

Maryrest began the quest that ended in compiling The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide. Like my introduction to green burial the name Green Burial Naturally is pure happenstance; when I needed to set up a website green burial was already taken. So I added what came Naturally.

Let’s get beyond the idea of perpetual care.

Perpetual grave in a corner churchyard at a busy intersection in Orange, New Jersey  Photo Credit: Tom Bailey

Let’s get beyond the idea of perpetual care.

Someday someone's going to be left with your body. What do you think should be done with it?

Each year 2.7 million people die in the US. That's a lot of bodies to take care of. A cremation rate of around 50 percent still leaves well over a million. Conventional cemeteries bury on average 1250 bodies per acre. Natural burial cemeteries generally bury in the hundreds per acre. Taking an average figure combined we would need around 4000 acres. This could be accommodated on a single square of land roughly two miles by three miles. That seems ridiculously small and doable in a country as vast as ours.

 But hang on, those figures are per year because grave rights are purchased in perpetuity. In just 10 years we would need 62.5 square miles, in 100 years we would be need 625 square miles, and on and on. Because people like to be buried either near where they live or someplace else meaningful, this would mean setting aside more and more land in prime locations just to bury our dead.

So why then do I advocate for green burial? Because I believe it's important for humans to see ourselves as part of the cycle of life rather than outside it, to seek "material immortality" in the words of Rachel Carson by allowing our bodies to go simply into the earth and the nutrients in our flesh recycled into new life.

So how could we do this and not sink under cities of the dead?

By foregoing perpetual care. Most European cemeteries lease burial plots for a set number of years with the option of paying a high price to get a perpetual lease. But in the US grave rights are eternal.

Most bodies buried naturally (i.e. in a shroud or biodegradable coffin) decompose to the skeleton in a dozen years or less. If cemeteries as they do in Europe were to institute a method for respectfully handling the skeletons, we could manage natural burial grounds to recycle the dead through the generations. The British Parliament is considering a rule change to allow cemeteries to remove bones and rebury them in a smaller box several feet below the original burial site, permitting a new body to be buried in the same grave. For natural burial cemeteries, markers if used could be reset in a wall for preservation. 

Another way to truly follow up on the idea of using natural burial to restore or preserve open land could mimic crop rotation; if a natural burial ground is filled sequentially, i.e. plots assigned at death next to the last ones filled, when a section is full it could lie fallow for a period of time while another section is opened. You could let bodies lie for a longer period and get the advantage of undisturbed meadow or forest instead of digging the land frequently.

We could make green burial not only an environmentally friendly option but also a sustainable way to use the earth.

In my father's neighborhood.

Ann setting temporary marker stone on her father's grave. photo: Tom Bailey.

It's been three months since I buried my father at Steelmantown Cemetery and the woods have changed with the season. When I visited this weekend most of the forest vegetation that masked the sound of nearby traffic was leafless, and oak leaves steadily spinning through hazy afternoon light softened the forest floor as they piled up in red-gold heaps. 

With my mother still alive I haven't had much time to grieve. It's not like I felt a wrenching hole in my psyche when my father died. Now sadness is creeping in on the accumulation of small moments when he would have been here, would have said something. And the holidays are coming up.

I need to address his absence, so Tom and I took a road trip to south Jersey. We stopped for lunch at Burger King at the exit from the Garden State Parkway, and I picked a table while Tom ordered food.

"This is probably where Ed comes for lunch," Tod smirked. "They're showing soccer on the tv."

At first I had no idea what he was talking about then I thought, oh yeah, he's just down the road. The idea of seeing my father sitting in the restaurant--the young Ed? Old and bent over? A ghoul? startled me into a laugh.

I'd been worried how I'd respond to seeing his grave; would I cry? No, I didn't. As we walked into the forest any morbid thoughts left me. My brother-in-law had wondered how we would find the grave and we did wander a bit; the moss-covered path converges and diverges and has deadends; until we recognized the recent grave of a Native American brought here from North Dakota. Luckily his is marked with colorful flags because my nearby father's grave was almost unrecognizable. He was a skinny guy, and we buried him in a shroud so there's not much to cave in. The mound of forest soil was settling under its blanket of oak leaves, and already a few shoots of wild blueberry and brambles poked through. 

When I knelt beside the grave I thought I caught a faint whiff of death but he's too far down for that. Too far down, I realized, to be in contact with the roots of the forest plants as I'd hoped. The late sun shown almost horizontally into the space and lit up silken webs being spun by tiny green spiders with red heads that I would never have noticed if I hadn't been so close.

This is my father's neighborhood. And he's active. His death is a process. I made a mental note to determine what stage he would be at based on passage of time. He's not stewing away. All those bodies in there, and Ed Bixby has sure been burying plenty, are busily working their way toward dissolution and not passively decomposing. My father couldn't stand to sit still; he shopped for food every day for an excuse to get out. His mound looked oddly like a body lying in wait under the leaves until we'd gone. Tom tried to get a photograph but there's too little relief to show his mound. 

We chose two new chunks from Ed's piles of fieldstone markers and pounded them into place, one for my mother's reserved grave and one for my father. It's humanly contrarian to want to mark a grave that's supposed to go back to the earth, but so be it. When the gravediggers filled in the grave they added conglomerate stone. I thought it looked artificial, or maybe I just needed to do something. Restless, like my father. 

The trail back was lined with stones where people had purchased plots pre-need. Ed has been selling as well as burying; the secret of green burial is out.

Why isn't cremation in this guidebook?

Fifty years after Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death cremation has overtaken burial as America's preferred choice for disposing of a body. So why isn't there a cremation line in the The Natural Burial Cemetery Guidebook?

Many of the cemeteries listed do bury cremated remains in their green burial sections or have separate sections. I don't happen to believe that cremation is green. Why?

1) Fossil fuels It takes 2 to 3 hours at extremely high heat to cremate a human body, and so far only non-renewable fossil fuels are up to the job of creating that environment.

2) Pollution Burning a body releases mercury and other toxic metals into the atmosphere, along with CO2.

3) Cremation burns everything into gas or ash. Green burial is about recycling a human body back into the earth, releasing its nutrients to be used by other life.

4) "What if I'm concerned about land use for burial? I take up less room if my ashes are buried in a biodegradable urn, even turned into a tree, right?" Actually unprocessed ashes are toxic, and render soil sterile when buried in concentrations. Those urns that create trees only sample your ashes. 

5) "I like simplicity." You can't seriously tell me a state-of-the-art crematory is a simple machine. Think of the pollution controls on your automobile.

I believe in the power of green burial to change how we do and view death. It's as simple as being buried in a shroud or pine box.