ROCKFORD—Plans were for Calvary and other diocesan Catholic cemeteries to continue to bury the very poor even as State of Illinois budget cuts eliminated the monetary assistance for those burials earlier this year.

However, that state budget item has been restored in the last few weeks, Carol Giambalvo says.

Giambalvo is director of Catholic Cemeteries for the Diocese of Rockford and a certified Catholic cemetery executive.

Unlike a lot of states, she says, for many years Illinois has provided some assistance to bury those on public aid and those who are homeless and sometimes unidentified. The state has provided, for example, $552 for cemetery services that normally cost $2,500.

In addition to providing such services, Calvary Cemetery provides gravesites to bury impoverished persons in an area which uses grave markers that are flush with the ground.

Occasionally, families will donate a plot for the cemetery to use. Other times individual graves located between family plots are used, Giambalvo says.

No marker is provided, but families may purchase a marker at any time. And, of course, records are kept of the location of each body, along with the coroner’s description.

Giambalvo works with coroners and funeral homes to provide this corporal work of mercy.

Fitzgerald Funeral Home, for example, had almost 100 urns of unclaimed  persons’ cremated remains, and Calvary Cemetery provided space for them in its mausoleum.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society also contacts Calvary Cemetery with burial needs for some of the people they assist.

“We’ve never turned away anybody,” Giambalvo says, adding, however, that those buried in Catholic cemeteries do need to be Catholic or have Catholic family members, such as a Catholic spouse or parent, buried there. “This is sacred ground –— Catholic ground,” Giambalvo says.

On a more earthly plane, a Catholic cemetery cannot bury anyone without Catholic ties or it risks losing its tax exemption status, she says.

Regarding persons who are unknown and/or whose remains are unclaimed, she says, “We can assume they are Catholic” and bury them accordingly.

The larger, diocesan cemeteries provide most of such burials, Giambalvo says. Mt. Hope Cemetery covers the Elgin area, Mt. Olivet Cemetery covers the Aurora area, Resurrection Cemetery serves St. Charles and Batavia, and Calvary Cemetery buries those from the greater Rockford area.

Diocesan cemeteries do not replace parish cemeteries, Giambalvo notes. At parish cemeteries, burial of a person with no ability to pay is up to the pastor, she says. The diocesan cemeteries office contact a parish if an indigent deceased person was known to be a parishioner there. By and large, however, “parishes have ‘way too much else to take care of,” she says, and in some cases counties have their own cemeteries and can take care of those burials.

The need to bury the indigent dead is not rare. The coroner in Chicago, Giambalvo says, had accumulated 500 unclaimed bodies and recently asked for help beyond Chicago borders. Mt. Hope Cemetery welcomed two of those bodies for burial there, she says.

The need in Chicago is, of course, much greater than in the Diocese of Rockford. Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Chicago publicly donated 300 graves to the county in 2012. It has since buried 198 human bodies and 608 fetal remains for the county, according to an April 16 Chicago Tribune article.

The most recent service, the article said, was held in December, for 18 unidentified bodies and 40 unclaimed fetal remains.

Whether the volume is large or small, to bury the dead is a work of mercy. The Catholic Church, including the Rockford Diocese, is committed to continue to assist in this corporal work.