Archbishop Corrado Lorefice As the Catholic archbishop of Palermo paid a visit to the Sicilian city’s largest cemetery on All Souls’ Day, he passed through a tent filled with stacks of coffins and blessed the 800 bodies still awaiting burial.
“Palermo needs new cemetery spaces where we can bury or cremate our dead, to keep them with dignity, visit them, commemorate them. No more coffins piled up,” Archbishop Corrado Lorefice said in his homily.
The archbishop offered Mass in the cemetery chapel on the grounds of Palermo’s Santa Maria dei Rotoli cemetery. He lamented that “hundreds of our dearly departed have not even found a decent burial place for a long time because of human neglect and the ignominy of those who want to make money even in the most decisive and disruptive moment of the mystery of life, which is death.”
The Rotoli cemetery has a large number of unburied coffins due to an administrative backlog and a spike in Covid deaths, according to Italian reports.
Archbishop Lorefice expressed dismay that after the outbreak of the pandemic, a time when so many people experienced “a lonely death” the people of Palermo now also experience “the drama of a failure to give a decent burial to so many of our dear departed fellow citizens, our relatives, and friends”.
Archbishop Lorefice added that we “must care for our cemeteries that hold the bodies of our loved ones awaiting this redemption, life, and fullness of freedom. We must make them welcoming, usable, spacious.
“Let us rest our dead with dignity and in peace while we await the resurrection, waiting to be able to embrace each other again in eternal life,” he said.