Author: Robert Wheeler

October 29, 2024
By: Detroit Catholic
Daniel Meloy

Hispanic community gathers at Our Lady of Hope Cemetery for a joyful celebration of the dead, a reminder of Christ’s victory

BROWNSTOWN TOWNSHIP — A Mariachi band playing, young people dancing, children lining up to have their faces painted. The cemetery was a lively place to commemorate the dead.

Our Lady of Hope Cemetery in Brownstown Township hosted its fourth annual Dia de los Muertos celebration on Oct. 26, complete with music, dancing, food and face painting, bringing longstanding Mexican traditions to southeast Michigan.

Veronica North, outreach manager to the Hispanic community for Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services (CFCS), said community events such as Dia de los Muertos serve a dual purpose in commemorating those who have died while allowing CFCS to reach out to the local Hispanic community.

“We are celebrating Dia de los Muertos in different ways; we have a lot of different folk dances and music, and the most important thing, the ‘ofrenda,’ which translates to ‘altar,’” North told Detroit Catholic. “The ‘ofrenda’ has three layers to it, to remind us the Church has three levels: The church that is still here, the militant; the church in purgatory, the penitent; and the church victorious, who made it to heaven.”

Our Lady of Hope Cemetery collected photographs and keepsakes of those who have died to place on its ofrenda in the cemetery’s mausoleum, where people could stop and pray in peace while the party was happening outside.

Dia de los Muertos is an infusion of All Souls Day — Nov. 2 — and ancient Mexican customs of honoring and invoking the guidance of one’s ancestors. When Spanish missionaries came to Mexico, they incorporated the ancient customs with All Souls Day, sanctifying the practice of remembers one’s deceased family members and preserving their memory.

Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services has been hosting Dia de los Muertos celebrations the weekend before All Souls Day for four years, inviting families to celebrate Mexican culture together. This year’s event included a Mass celebrated by Fr. Cornelius Okeke of St. Andre Bessette Parish in Ecorse.

“The Hispanic community in the Archdiocese of Detroit is really growing, so we need to serve them as we serve other communities,” North said. “We do a lot of events and activities in Spanish so people can relate. As children of God, we know faith is really important, and the celebration of life is particularly important in the Hispanic community.”

Sylvia Lozoya of St. Mary Magdelen Parish in Melvindale and St. Andre Bessette Parish — and director of human resources at Alliance Catholic Credit Union, which also sponsored the event — came to Our Lady of Hope Cemetery not only to volunteer, but to remember her siblings, Maria Teresa Lozoya and Jose Pieda Lozoya, who are interred at Our Lady of Hope.

Lozoya said the Dia de los Muertos celebrations at Our Lady of Hope remind her of celebrations back home in Parral, Chihuahua, in Mexico.

“Being away from our home country, this is as close as it gets,” Lozoya said. “Being able to celebrate our loved ones, it’s part of our culture, so for the archdiocese doing this for us in this country is amazing. It’s an opportunity to continue with the culture we so much enjoy. Being able to listen to the music, have the ofrenda, all at a cemetery, just like back at home. We are very grateful to (Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services) for being able to provide this for our culture.”

Lozoya said Dia de los Muertos has both individualistic and community aspects. Immediate family gather around a particular loved one’s grave to pray and celebrate good memories of the deceased, but having multiple families, and even people who aren’t of Hispanic heritage, at a community event like the Dead of the Dead celebrations at Our Lady of Hope allow the community to share in the joys in remembering a loved one who has passed away.

“The cemetery has opened this not just to the Hispanic community, but the whole community around the area, because we know none of our deceased relatives are truly gone,” Lozoya said. “This is a beautiful occasion for us to come together and celebrate with them. They are always with us in our hearts and souls.”

Beyond visiting gravesites and remembering the dead, many young people took part in Mexican folk dances with the Ballet Folklorico de Detroit.

Jasmine Ramirez of St. Pius X Parish in Southgate and the Basilica of Ste. Anne de Detroit was wearing her customary dresses of the Mexican state of Guerrero as she and a group of dancers participated in traditional dances from the region.

Dressed in short sleeves that were decorated with beads hand-woven in and a skirt made from silk with embroidered flowers on it, Ramirez said days such as Dia de los Muertos are great opportunities to show the richness of Mexican culture to those who might not be familiar.

“Celebrating Day of the Dead means celebrating the loss of loved ones, remembering the times they were living,” Ramirez said. “But when we are dancing, we are doing more than just remembering, we are bringing out the soul of Mexican culture and, in a way, bring back the dead ones who used to dance.”

Ramirez, as were many young people, had their faces painted in two halves, one half in traditional makeup, the other in black and white, resembling a skull. The pattern signifies the dual nature of the holiday, commemorating the dead and celebrating what it means to be alive.

“On a day like today, besides performing and dancing and showing my culture, Dia de los Muertos is a day for loved ones from Mexico, for remembering not the bad times, but the happy times we shared with the deceased while they were living,” Ramirez said.

North said the day was a success, judging by the smiles and laughter that were present around the cemetery grounds, a sign that in the Christian faith, the departed haven’t left the Christian community, but have gone on to another space, leaving behind the joys and memories they brought to their loved ones on earth, and whom they will meet again in Paradise.

“People learn from events like this that life is joyful, and we have to go through death to get to eternal life,” North said. “They learn that we are never alone; even in our grieving, we are supported by brothers and sisters in the faith.”

November 1, 2024
By: Detroit Catholic
Gabriella Patti

Headstones, mausoleums, monuments and niches each tell stories of the lives they mark, call the living to prayer and reflection

SOUTHFIELD — In the Catholic Church, November is recognized as the month of All Souls, a time set aside to remember, pray for and memorialize the faithful departed.

For many, that means visiting a cemetery, where the final resting place of a loved one can bring comfort and inspire faith and memories of a life well lived.

More than 100,000 burials have taken place on the peaceful 370 acres at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield, marked by headstones dating back to 1928. While headstone markers make it easier for loved ones and family members to find the deceased’s final resting place, they also serve as a powerful memorial and testament to life.

“One of the first questions that any family service adviser would ask (when planning a burial) is intentionally open-ended: ‘How do you want to be memorialized?’” Nick Vaghy, location manager at Holy Sepulchre, explained to Detroit Catholic. “It’s about the legacy that you want to leave, (but also), you have monuments or markers designed by the family who has been left behind, so it is a testament of what the deceased meant to the person they left behind.”

Holy Sepulchre is one of six cemeteries in the Archdiocese of Detroit operated by Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services. The oldest of those is St. Joseph Cemetery in Monroe, which has been in continuous operation since approximately 1801.

As the largest of the six, Holy Sepulchre’s grounds are the final resting place of the majority of Detroit’s bishops, as well as other locally notable people, such as former Detroit Tigers owners Mike Illitch and Frank Navin, former Michigan governor Harry Francis Kelly, and countless clergy and religious.

The variety of headstones, ranging from flush markers to grand mausoleums and obelisks to the more recently installed glass display niches for urns and mementos, tracks the history of how Catholics in southeast Michigan have chosen to memorialize the deceased.

The earliest tombstones at Holy Sepulchre are mostly flush to the ground (whereas cemeteries dating back to the 1800s tend to have more upright markers).

Amy Elliott Bragg, director of education and communications at the Historic Elmwood Cemetery & Foundation, a non-denominational cemetery that has operated in Detroit since 1846, said headstones often reflect changing trends in art, fashion, architecture and even cultural ideas and norms surrounding death.

“There are macro trends that you can see at Elmwood Cemetery, for example, and also micro-trends,” Elliot Bragg explained.

Historical movements, such as the Egyptian Revival in the 1920s and times of leaner means, such as the Great Depression and wartime, influence styles and the grandeur of monuments, Elliott Bragg said.

Vaghy added cultural backgrounds play a huge role in determining how people choose to be memorialized.

“One of the sections is part of our very large Chaldean population, very proud Catholics, important members of our community here, where memorialization for them is in the form of monuments and uprights,” Vaghy explained. “You definitely get the personality of the deceased or the family that is designing it because obviously, being a Catholic cemetery, you are building monuments that are both a testament to the person but also very religious.”

The monuments mostly consist of statues of Mary, the Holy Family and angels, but also include other images, such as the bronze tigers guarding Tigers owner Navin’s mausoleum.

People make statements of individuality with their headstone choices, even through elements such as stone color or font, and often through quotes or images, Vaghy said.

Elliot Bragg said while she sees many symbols, from someone’s favorite food to a symbol of their career, a majority of headstone symbols are religious in nature.

“There is always an element of religiosity running through memorial art and design, and it is not universal, but (often) there is something as overt as a cross on the monument, or a Bible verse,” Elliot Bragg said. “There is also a sort of symbolism. The Victorians loved putting lots of little designs on the gravestone that would suggest to the person looking at it that they were a person of faith. (For example), a symbol like an anchor, which can be both a symbol of hope but also a cross in disguise or a suggestion of anchoring yourself to Jesus.”

Humans have been marking graves since prehistoric times, Elliot Bragg noted, even with something as simple as a rock or a stone. However, recently, more and more people have chosen to cremate their loved ones, explained Deanna Cortese, outreach director for Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services.

Cremation rates have steadily risen since the Second Vatican Council in 1963 made the practice permissible. In 2016, the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith offered further guidance for this practice to address the growing number of people who wanted to hold onto the ashes of deceased loved ones or scatter them.

In 2018, Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron released a pastoral note on the topic of Christian burial, “An Act of Mercy and Faith,” a follow-up to his 2013 pastoral letter, “In Union with Christ’s Dying and Rising.” In response to the archbishop’s 2013 letter, Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services began an initiative encouraging families with cremated remains of loved ones at home to bring them to a Catholic cemetery to be buried at no cost. Since then, the initiative, called “Gather Them Home,” has interred more than 8,000 cremated remains.

While cremation is generally less costly than a traditional full-body burial, Cortese and Vaghy noted that new trends have emerged surrounding cremated remains. Catholic tradition teaches that remains “must always be treated with the same respect the Church accords to the bodies of the deceased, and this includes their reverent disposition in a cemetery,” Archbishop Vigneron wrote in 2013.

“The requirements are that once you are laid to rest, you are laid to rest, and it is not disturbed,” Vaghy explained.

Most recently, Holy Sepulchre has added new Our Lady of Lourdes glass-front niches in its St. John Paul II Mausoleum. These illuminated niches can be used to showcase mementos and create a lasting tribute to the deceased. Each display tells a story and presents like a time capsule: a beloved grandmother who loved to golf, a couple married for 60 years, a grandfather who worked for Michigan Bell Telephone Co., and an infant gone too soon.

“Monuments and markers are amazing, as they are big pieces of granite that you can shape into your testament, but here you can take the monuments and markers out of it and really bring in the family dynamic,” Vaughy said of the niches.

The various ways that people choose to memorialize their loved ones remind us that cemeteries are for the living, Cortese added.

“Grief is such a journey for people, and it never ends,” Cortese said. “One of the ladies I used to work with here used to say you never get over it; you just learn to move through it because it is always there. So if that brings a family comfort knowing mom has got her favorite hat next to her, that is part of their grief that day.”

From the perspective of historic preservation, it is important to know where people are buried, Elliot Bragg said, but headstones also are a reminder of a life lived.

“(Headstones) help me make a personal connection to somebody who is no longer here, but lived a life that I might want to remember and that members of our community might want to remember,” Elliot Bragg said. “Even just a simple placing of a stone or rock over the place where someone is buried indicates that a life was lived and that their absence is noticed. That is a very simple expression that goes back to this very human urge that we all have when somebody dies.”

November 4, 2024
By: Detroit Catholic

Archbishop Vigneron blesses cremains from St. James in Ferndale, Our Lady of Fatima in Oak Park on All Souls Day at Holy Sepulchre

SOUTHFIELD — At cemeteries across the Archdiocese of Detroit, the faithful gathered Nov. 2 to pray that the dead may be cleansed from all attachments and stains of sin in order to be united with God in heaven.

It’s an ancient, pious tradition in the Church that goes back to Scripture and a moment of tremendous grace, said Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron, who celebrated Mass at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield on All Souls Day.

“How blessed we are the Holy Spirit has brought us to this sacred place to pray for our own beloved dead, and indeed, the souls of all the faithful departed,” Archbishop Vigneron said at the start of Mass. “This is a place where so many have been buried in the confidence they will rise to eternal life. This is the fruit of the death and rising of Jesus. This is what the sacrifice is about, the sacrifice about to made present in our midst with the Sacrament.”

Faithful across the Archdiocese of Detroit brought the cremated remains of their loved ones to Holy Sepulchre Cemetery and Our Lady of Hope Cemetery in Brownstown Township as part of Catholic and Funeral Cemetery Services’ Gather Them Home initiative.

Archbishop Vigneron blessed the cremains brought to Holy Sepulchre after Mass, along with the cremains of 250 souls interred in the columbariums at the recently closed St. James Church in Ferndale as well as Our Lady of Fatima Church in Oak Park, which make up Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish.

The parish contacted Catholic and Funeral Cemetery Services about transferring the cremains to Holy Sepulchre so parishioners past and present can still visit where their loved ones are interred.

“There will be two crypts in the garden mausoleum on the east side of the cemetery dedicated to these two churches and a wall of memorialization for the people who will be laid to rest,” Bob Hojnacki, director of cemeteries for the Archdiocese of Detroit, told Detroit Catholic.

Fr. Jeff Scheeler, OFM, a priest in solidum at the Church of the Transfiguration in Southfield and moderator of the South Oakland 5 Family of Parishes, which includes Our Mother of Perpetual Help, said it was a great relief to Our Mother of Perpetual Help parishioners to know the remains of past parishioners were being transferred to consecrated ground where they will be remembered and prayed for.

“They certainly will be remembered here, both sets of remains,” Fr. Scheeler said. “When the decision was made to close St. James, the discernment team wanted to have the remains available for people to visit. We have a separate crypt for St. James and Our Lady of Fatima, so families can still visit where their loved ones are.”

Since 2013, Catholic cemeteries in the Archdiocese of Detroit have laid to rest more than 8,000 cremains at no cost to be placed in the All Souls Remembrance crypts at Holy Sepulchre and Our Lady of Hope cemeteries.

Hojnacki said any family with cremated remains can contact either cemetery to have them interred in the crypts, where they will be prayed for every month during committal services.

“This program has been huge,” Hojnacki said of Gather Them Home. “It started about nine years ago, and since its inception, we’ve laid to rest almost 8,000 cremains that people have.”

Hojnacki said the remains come from families who have kept ashes and urns at home and weren’t sure what do with them, as well as cremains that have gone unclaimed at local funeral homes and morgues. Through Gather Them Home, the cemeteries accept and inter the cremains at no cost.

“People feel relieved they can put to rest their families at a Catholic cemetery,” Hojnacki said. “Our employees feel good, knowing these families have trusted these remains in our care.”

During his homily, Archbishop Vigneron asked the faithful gathered to think about what it means to pray for the dead, and, specifically, what it means to pray for the dead so that they might reach the final goal — heaven.

“We begin by thinking about heaven itself; it’s not a big barbeque, it’s not some sort of divine resort. Heaven is about love,” Archbishop Vigneron said. “Heaven is about entering into the very communion that exists between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we can only really participate in that divine love if we have no stain or taint of sins in our lives. As long as we do not love God the Father with the very love of the heart of His Son, we are not ready yet to enjoy the life and happiness of heaven.”

It is the task of the living to pray for the dead that they might be united with God the Father in heaven and that all traces of sin be cleansed from their souls, the archbishop added.

All Souls Day, and every time the dead are remembered, is a chance to proclaim that death does not have the final say and that the departed are still in union with the Church on earth, one communion that gives thanks, praise and worship to God, particularly in the Eucharist, the archbishop said.

“The communion we have in the body of Christ is so strong that we are able to pray even for those who have passed out of this world,” Archbishop Vigneron said. “In Christ, death is not a burial, so our prayers can sustain even those who are engaged in this final form of conversion.”

Archbishop Vigneron reflected on the liturgy’s readings, from the Book of Wisdom proclaiming that the souls of the righteous are in the hands of the God, and the Gospel according to St. John, in which Christ promises his followers that anyone who believes in him will have eternal life.

The archbishop drew particular attention to St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, which states that being baptized with Christ means that they, too, have been baptized in Christ’s death and, therefore, Christ’s resurrection. This makes the day’s commemoration of the dead all the more poignant as the faithful realize they are not destined for the grave, but for God, and the prayers of the faithful assist the deceased on this journey.

“This is why we offer the Holy Eucharist for those who have gone before us,” Archbishop Vigneron said. “Because in the Holy Eucharist, this passage from death to life by Jesus, this passage to which our loved ones have immersed, has been made present under the appearances of bread and wine. The paschal Jesus, the Jesus who endured death, conquered death, trampled on death, rose from the dead, is made present here. So, you and I are able to join with Jesus in offering this Holy Sacrifice to the Father by which the souls of the dead are purified. That is the meaning of us gathered here today.”

Sep 10, 2024
Lisa C. Norton, Communications & Philanthropy Manager

Our friends at Catholic Funeral & Cemetery Services bring compassion and understanding for families experiencing a loss.

Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services is one of the presenting sponsors at this year’s Walk of Remembrance. Why do they choose to support Angela Hospice? They believe in the good work of Angela Hospice and the mission that drives it. In fact, it is very much like their own mission.

“Death is a scary topic for a lot of people to talk about or to face, and what we try to do is give families the education that they need to make decisions,” explained Deanna Cortese, Outreach Director for CFCS. “We try to educate families on what they need to do, give them all of that information, and then let them decide afterwards what’s best for them and their family.”

Just like planning for end-of-life care, Deanna said planning for burial or cremation is something it is best for individuals to think about in advance.

“Hopefully they’re making those decisions at a time that’s not so emotional and filled with grief,” she said.

Deanna has worked with many families over years, supporting them during a difficult time. And CFCS believes in continuing that support in an ongoing way.

“You form bonds with strangers that become like family to you, because you’re helping them walk this difficult time. So our goal is to also continue with these families on their journey after a death has happened,” Deanna shared.

That’s why CFCS has developed a robust program to help families stay connected to the loved ones they’ve lost, including masses and events for holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Christmas. They’ll also be inviting some of the families they serve to join them at the Walk of Remembrance.

As a non-profit, CFCS not only provides outreach to their families and groups like Angela Hospice, they also serve the community through charitable programs. Their All Souls Remembrance Program offers burial or cremation services at a discounted rate or free of charge for those in need, because CFCS believes all people deserve to be laid to rest with respect and dignity. In addition, the organization works with families who have lost a child, providing low cost or no cost burial services to these grieving families.

While CFCS’s foundation is rooted in their Catholic faith, they serve people of all faiths, working throughout the Archdiocese of Detroit. Locations include Holy Cross Cemetery in Detroit, Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield, Mount Carmel in Wyandotte, Mount Hope in Pontiac, Our Lady of Hope Cemetery in Brownstown, and St. Joseph Cemetery in Monroe.