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Re St Mary, Weston Turville

Oxford Consistory Court: Bursell Ch, August 2007 Memorial – churchyard regulations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2007

Justin Gau
Affiliation:
Barrister, Deputy Chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln
Ruth Arlow
Affiliation:
Barrister, Deputy Chancellor of the Diocese of Chichester
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Abstract

Type
Case Notes
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2008

The petitioner's daughter had died in 2004 aged eighteen but was a special needs child and was, in the words of the petitioner, ‘only ever going to be a child’. The proposed headstone was, therefore, until the death of one of her parents going to be a child's headstone, heart-shaped, with the figure of an angel praying leaning on the top of the heart, with the inscription: ‘It broke our hearts to lose you/But you didn't go alone/For part of us went with you/The day God called you home’. The memorial fell outside the scope of the Churchyard Regulations. The PCC voted by a majority against such a memorial. The chancellor accepted that there was no difficulty in principle with a temporary memorial, but that the petitioner's daughter's childlike qualities should be commemorated in a permanent rather than temporary fashion. He ruled that the design of the temporary memorial was inappropriate, as it would stand out in the midst of the conventional designs surrounding it. He reserved any final decisions as to the design of the memorial to himself, to give more pastoral freedom to the priest-in-charge. [JG]