NEW ORLEANS (OSV News) — A funeral urn filled with ashes was found abandoned in 2022 on a park bench in Tennessee, more than 1,000 miles east of Minneapolis.
As Jamie Moloney, director of pastoral outreach for the Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, recalls the family odyssey her staff helped resolve, she realizes the spiritual and emotional significance of the archdiocese’s “Bringing Them Home” initiative that provides a proper Catholic burial for cremains that long have been forgotten on a mantel, inside a dark closet or tucked away in a storage unit.
Or, in this case, plopped on a park bench.
The key to cracking the Tennessee case was a small, stainless steel disc with a unique serial number — mixed in with the ashes — that bore the name of the deceased man and the Minnesota funeral home that had cremated his body.
After looking up the deceased man’s records, the funeral home was able to contact his brother.
“He told them, ‘Oh, my gosh, I am so relieved,'” Moloney said. “His mother had kept his urn in her apartment for years, but when she died and they went to clean out her house, it was nowhere to be found. They were devastated. They had given it up for lost. Somehow, after her death, that urn got placed on a park bench hundreds of miles away.”
That urn — and 96 others since 2019 — have been buried in one of two chapel mausoleums set aside in Resurrection Cemetery in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, and Gethsemane Cemetery in New Hope, Minnesota. “Bringing Them Home” was championed by Sister Fran Donnelly, a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and former cemeteries director Joan Gecik to provide a permanent, secure resting place for the cremated remains of loved ones.
Many of the urns interred in the two crypts in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis have come from funeral homes — families have never come back to claim the cremains. The cost is minimal — about $200 — and the deceased does not have to have been Catholic, Moloney said. A formal record of burial is maintained at the cemetery, and the name of the deceased is inscribed in a book of remembrance.
One of the important stipulations to which families must agree is that the cremated remains will never be disinterred.
“They are here to rest,” Moloney told OSV News.
Catholic Cemeteries has taken the ambitious step to advertise the initiative in The Catholic Spirit, the archdiocesan publication, in parish bulletins and in the metro area’s two daily newspapers.
One family saw the advertisements and began to rethink what they had done after their grandmother’s death: They had taken some of her cremated remains and fashioned them into lockets or other pieces of jewelry to wear.
“The family came back last year, and they collected all the jewelry they could find, because now they realized they didn’t want all this jewelry floating around out there,” Moloney said. “They collected as many as they could and brought it to us to bury with the cremated remains we had already buried of that person.”
Personal preference for keeping loved ones “close” can be short-sighted, Moloney said.
“It’s an issue for honoring the dead,” Moloney added. “When people have the urns at home, they can very quickly become someone else’s property. So, Mom and Dad die, and they maybe had Grandpa’s urn, then one of the kids gets the urn, and the kids move, and they forget that the urn is there, and pretty soon it’s lost. So, people who buy a new home might find an urn in a cupboard.”
The issue of properly interring cremated remains continues to grow in importance. The Cremation Association of North America, or CANA, said the cremation rate grew to nearly 62% in 2024 and is expected to rise to 65.2% in 2025 and nearly 73% by 2030. On the West Coast, the cremation rate is nearing 80%.
Joseph Heckel, vice president of the Catholic Cemetery Conference, the national Catholic cemeteries association, and executive director of Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, said the growth in cremation requires a vigorous catechetical outreach to Catholics.
“I’ve been doing this for 33 years for the Archdiocese of Newark, and when I started we had no cremation space at all,” Heckel told OSV News. “Now, a third of our interments are cremains. When loved ones are cremated, sometimes people keep them at home. Ultimately, you’re trying to help them come to holy ground and not to be scattered.”
In Newark, Heckel said Catholic cemeteries provide multiple options — some less expensive than others — to help people make the decision for burial. One easy option is interring the cremains in an existing family grave.
“If a family has a grave and all the right people approve it, there’s a place to memorialize a cremation space,” Heckel said. “It’s inexpensive for families and they can be together and get their loved ones into holy ground.”
Sherri Peppo, executive director of New Orleans Catholic Cemeteries, said many New Orleans Catholics — who now choose cremation 52% of the time — use family tombs to inter cremains. There are other options such as niches in a cremation garden.
Because of the sensitivity of the topic, Peppo prefers to use a soft approach to persuade people to bury their loved ones’ cremated remains.
“We will talk about, ‘Who’s going to be responsible for the remains once you pass away? Where’s the urn going to end up?'” Peppo said. “We tread lightly and go with a little bit of reasoning.”
And, at a practical level, Peppo said, there is the genealogical significance of official burial records.
“We do get a lot of genealogy requests,” Peppo said. “If you don’t bury these urns, the trail just runs out. There’s just no place to find them.”
Betty-Ann Hickey, associate director of the Office of Worship for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, said it is understandable why families want to keep their loved ones close, which is manifested by the jewelry products that are available for cremains.
“While these things are well-intentioned, they miss the mark on what we believe is the value of the human body,” Hickey said. “So, if you turn this person’s cremated remains into a diamond, you’re going to wear this. Is the next person who wears this going to understand what this is? I get phone calls from folks who have found cremated remains in urns at Goodwill or in the dumpster. I get phone calls from generations down the line who say, ‘I have my great aunt’s ashes. I don’t want them.'”
“And, then,” she continued, “they may not necessarily treat them with the respect due to a human body, not to mention that those remains become the possession of just one person. If I have Grandma’s remains in my house, I’m then in control of who can and can’t come and visit and anyone can come and pray. I know that the family members who chose to keep those remains never imagined this would happen.”
In Minneapolis, Moloney said the bottom line is the Catholic teaching on respect for the body, the temple of the Holy Spirit.
“I would just hope that people would understand this as a person whose life made a difference, and they deserve a final resting place,” she said. “Our goal is to bury the dead and not leave them kind of wandering out there. It is truly honoring the whole person and letting them rest in peace.”
