On Oct. 16, officials from the Lake County Coroner’s Office and Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Chicago buried the cremated remains of 79 indigent people at Ascension Cemetery in Libertyville.

It was the first time the remains of people whose families could not afford to claim their bodies for burial or whose families could not be found were buried at the cemetery.

Since 2012, Catholic Cemeteries and the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office have buried the remains of the unborn, indigent or unknown people at Mount Olivet Cemetery on the South Side.

The burials in Cook County began after the county morgue became overcrowded and Catholic Cemeteries offered space at Mount Olivet.

The two agencies eventually entered into a formal agreement after county officials saw the level of respect and care Catholic Cemeteries brought to burials, said Father Lawrence Sullivan, priest director of Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Burials also include the remains of the unborn from Cook County’s Stroger Hospital.

The backlog of burials started in large part because the previous year the state of Illinois ended its practice of paying funeral directors to bury the indigent. When Catholic Cemeteries heard of the backlog, they offered space at Mount Olivet.

“It really did all start from us stepping up to the plate during that moment of crisis,”  Sullivan said. “That has now become the regular way that we do things.”

To date, the remains of 3,300 adults and 1,553 unborn children — a total of 4,853 people — have been buried in Cook and Lake counties.

Catholic Cemeteries will surpass 5,000 burials of the remains of people who are unidentified or indigent with its next service at Mount Olivet on Nov. 20.

Lake County officials were trying to arrange a similar type of burial to what Catholic Cemeteries does in Cook County for some time, Sullivan said.

“Now they were just able to decide that it was the time to act,” Sullivan explained. “We chose (Ascension) cemetery because we wanted to make it easy for any family members who wanted to come to the service or come by later.”

As is the practice with burials at Mount Olivet, funeral directors volunteered their services to accompany the remains from the coroner’s office to Ascension Cemetery and stayed with them until they were interred. 

Participants placed white roses atop the caskets, which contained the cremated remains of several people or unborn babies.

“Why do we do it? Well, we don’t do it because the person is Catholic or not. We do it because we are Catholic,” Sullivan said. “We do take our commitment to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy seriously.”

Cemeteries have always been important for Christians, and many of the earliest Masses were celebrated at the graves of the martyrs, Sullivan noted.

“When we talk about ministering to people, because we believe that graves are important, because we believe that we want to have a place to remember this person and to pray for them, we believe that this burial is so important to us,” Sullivan said.