CiSup (Cimetières supraconfessionels)
Supraconfessional Cemeteries
Legal, social, environmental, and public health challenges
Following up on the internationally comparative CeMi project, which highlighted cemeteries as public spaces that act as cultural contact zones and underlined the necessity to adapt future cemeteries and funerary practices to a multicultural and multi-faith society, the Luxembourg Ministère des Affaires intérieures funds a feasibility study concerning the matter.
Luxembourg’s population is undergoing rapid demographical change, which calls for new infrastructures not only of the living but also of the dead. Since 1804 cemeteries are confessionally neutral and managed by the municipalities (communes). In practice, however, they are often shaped by Catholic heritage and rather strict regulations. Cremation, cinerary funerary monuments and areas for scattering ashes have only been introduced very gradually in the twentieth century, with the intercommunal crematorium of Hamm only opening in 1995. Residents of other denominations have often opted to have their bodies “repatriated” even if their homeland had become Luxembourg, because of a lack of facilities.
The project aims to study socio-cultural, public health related, environmental, as well as legal aspects that must be considered when establishing intermunicipal inter, multi or supraconfessional cemeteries. These aspects include but are not limited to legal time constraints to bury or cremate, (perpetual) grave rights, cemetery design and facilities as well as funerary and grave-visiting rites.