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Urn Graves: Austrian Diocese Finds Comfort in Apple Cores

The Apfelbaum Urnengarten (Apple Tree Urn Garden) at the St. Barbara cemetery in Linz, for which the Diocese of Linz is responsible, opened its doors on 8 July 2020.

The website Diozese-Linz.at writes that apple trees and apple cores are "memorial signs," and apple rings made of stone are "central design elements" of the tomb complex.

The cinerarium was designed by the Viennese sculptor Arnold Reinthaler, who said at the opening ceremony that the apple core accompanies a person through life and in the end marks the place of mourning.

Biodegradable urns are buried in the garden meadow where the apple trees grow and feed the latter.

Portable apple seed shaped stones are used as memorials instead of tomb monuments. Inscriptions on the stone cores may be done individually.

Father Manfred Wageneder blessed the cinerarium expressing his wish that the garden become a place of confidence, hope for eternal life, and a place of comfort for the people.

A snack was served at the opening: apple strudel and apple juice. Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t (Shakespeare).

Ultraviolet
This is a despicable trend, unsurprisingly promoted by the warped leftist German Church. Fake cemeteries have neither the lasting permanence nor the dignity of a traditional internment and monument.
Sooner or later, someone will look at all that land and say, "This is prime real-estate. We can sell this and make a fortune." and someone else will say, "We can buy this, build houses or condos or …More
This is a despicable trend, unsurprisingly promoted by the warped leftist German Church. Fake cemeteries have neither the lasting permanence nor the dignity of a traditional internment and monument.

Sooner or later, someone will look at all that land and say, "This is prime real-estate. We can sell this and make a fortune." and someone else will say, "We can buy this, build houses or condos or flats and make a fortune."

Without having read the fine-print, I'm fairly certain there are clauses in the internment agreement for Apfelbaum that loved ones have NO claim on the property or the trees where their loved ones were buried. In a word, they don't have any rights. This is intentional.

Ttraditional cemeteries are different. When I buried my kin, the cemetery handed me a deed for those plots of land. I -own- that land. That means all the standard property rights apply, including access to my property. The cemetery can't deny me access to MY land just like a rich man can't buy all the property around one small cottage and deny the owner access to it.

That's true for me and every family with someone buried there. That land is ours.

There's a permanence, a tangibility to a traditional grave and a traditional monument that preserves the memory of a loved one, long after their death.

Humans have recognized that since the time of the Egyptians. The Pharaohs and the Caesars still stare back at us in stone thousands of years laters.

Even if we can't afford statues, there are options for ceramic photo plaques and digital photo etching on the stone. A loved one's face will stare back through time for centuries.

But the Apple Tree Urn Garden? ;-) This is diabolically clever. There is nothing to stop the bulldozers and the back-hoes when the land gets sold off. Think about it. There are no coffins, no concrete grave liners or huge marble stones. Just trees and a few bones underneath.

The area will get fenced off when the desecration takes place and even if someone snaps photos, our society is so jaded it will be forgotten in a week.

That is what will inevitably happen. Not maybe, not could be. It -will- happen.

There's nothing to stop the sale or the purchase or the bulldozers except (wait for it) 'the courts'

Get that? The courts... and COVID has already shown the world how 'the courts' treat people's religious concerns.

When the choice is between a few families and their memories and the "common good" of subsidized housing for more immigrants, which will 'the courts' in Germany choose, much less anywhere else?
Tesa
One should rather depose a prelate, or cut off a deacon, than permit the Church to be scandalized: "cut it off, and cast it from you." (Matthew 18:8) —St. Thomas Aquinas
G.K.Chesterton
We read in the greatest of texts that God is Love, but we do not read anywhere that God is Sentimentalism.