The impending closure of the beloved 111-year-old Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Woodhaven is sending shadows across a community whose residents worry the diocese could sell the site to someone with little reverence for the historical building and the cemetery behind it….
According to a message in the church’s May 8 service bulletin, the rector, the Rev. Tracey Williams, will continue to live on site until plans for the sale of the church are finalized. Diocese officials did not say when they expect to sell the church, nor to whom. They said the building will be deconsecrated during the last service.
“This action has been taken after many years of faithful ministry in the midst of a declining population and dwindling resources,” the Rev. Lawrence Provenzano, bishop of the Long Island diocese, wrote in a recent e-mail to supporters.
Something is dysfunctional there since they haven’t reported numbers since 2005. P&P that year was abysmal; it’s a wonder it wasn’t closed years ago.
It is typical that local folks feel a sense of alarm about the building and cemetery not continuing on in perdictable splendor. But the concern about the lovely building and cemetery did not rise to the level of actually attending the services that would sustain them.
Pardon my ignorance, but can you sell a cemetery? Can youu just abandon it? Statmann
Stamann, I know personally of one Catholic cemetery in Utica, New York, where my maternal great grandparents were buried, St Joseph’s Church cemetery, which was closed in 1915 when the parish merged with another. The remains of all of the people buried there were “religiously disinterred,” and removed to a new Catholic cemetery nearby, so that a parking lot could be built on the cemetery property. The remains were “religiously reinterred,” and a marble monument was erected in place of the original headstones, which were inscribed in German. So much for marking your relatives’ graves so that you could find them. So, yes, a cemetery [i]can[/i] be abandoned.
In most states (if not all), you cannot any longer just unilaterally move remains without at least some attempt to consult the living relatives and get their consent, nor can a cemetery simply be used for other purposes without consent of the living relatives consent. Statute of limitations I imagine do exist. Sometimes living relatives can’t be found. Getting rid of a cemetery is a major legal harangue. Again, local laws varies considerably depending on the state.
In this case, I imagine there are some particularly nasty legal goodies tying up the sell of the property, if this sentence is any indication, “the church purchased from the city [the cemetery] in the early 1960s and which was also placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.”
I would imagine there is a clause in that deed that should the parish ever wish to sell its property and close, the ownership of the cemetery would revert back to the city. The fact that the premises is on the National Historic Register actually gives quite a bit of leverage to the local residents (and living descendants of those buried in the churchyard), should the parish try to sell to a developer or someone who wants to radically change the property for use and structure other than its intended purpose.