[Question]{.underline}: Can the Church sell or give a Catholic cemetery to the city?
[Answer]{.underline}: It is truly extraordinary to think that such a question could arise. When Catholics request to be buried in the consecrated ground of a Catholic cemetery, it is to await the general resurrection of the body at the end of the world. The Code of Canon Law consequently does not even consider the question of the reduction of a cemetery to a profane use.
However, Canon 1207 of the 1917 Code does point out that the rules for violation (i.e. sacrilegious) and reconciliation of churches are also to be applied to cemeteries. It is reasonable to conclude, by the principle of juridical analogy, that the same could apply to the reduction of a cemetery to a profane use. Canon 1187 of the 1917 Code and Canon 1222 of the 1983 Code do in fact state that a church that can no longer be used for public worship can be reduced, by decree of the Ordinary of the diocese, to a profane use (and hence sold), provided that the use is not “sordid,” that is, sinful or scandalous.
Clearly, this is not something to be done lightly. However, the Church does allow for this eventuality, prescribing that if this be done any bodies that may have been buried in the church be removed first and buried in consecrated ground (Fr. Wuest, Matters Liturgical (1959), pp. 71-72). It follows likewise that if this is applied to a Catholic cemetery, the bodies that are buried there, that are consecrated through the sacrament of Baptism, must be exhumed. This means that a necessary condition for the reduction of a cemetery to a profane use, such as making a park of it, or building on it, or placing a highway over it, would be the removal of all the bodies buried in the cemetery. This is the commentary of Matters Liturgical: “A cemetery that has been solemnly or simply blessed cannot be desecrated except perhaps by decree of the local Ordinary reducing it to profane, non-sordid uses according to the norm of Cn 1187 insofar as it is applicable. But before the decree goes into effect, all bodies of the faithful shall be transferred to another blessed cemetery” (p. 146).
It is consequently a sacrilege and an offense against Almighty God for a bishop to deliver up a cemetery to the city for such profane use without ensuring the removal of all the bodies buried there beforehand; and if this has already been done, his successor has the obligation to do all in his power to exhume and rebury the bodies in consecrated ground.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.