WOODBRIDGE [New Jersey] — Three years ago after Antoinette Partesi buried her father Edmund at St. Gertrude Cemetery, the family placed a veteran’s grave marker next to his headstone to honor his service in the Army during the Korean War.
The marker remained in that spot until she visited “a couple of weeks ago and I noticed it was missing,” she said. Also gone were two statues of saints, which had been placed on the grave stone.
The Archdiocese of Newark, which owns the cemetery in the Colonia section of Woodbridge, considers the bronze marker and other decorations to be “trip hazards.”
Partesi thinks “that’s ridiculous” and says her family should have been notified before the cemetery took away the marker, which is now missing.
…
Archdiocese spokesman Jim Goodness said the marker “sticks in the ground,” could get hidden by snow and “if a person falls down, (they) could get impaled by it.”
“There are very practical reasons for why this prohibition has been in place for a number of years,” Goodness said. “We do a good job of informing people.”
Read the full article in the January 16, 2011 edition of MyCentralJersey.com
And the Church wonders why so many of us have left. I consider what they did a desecration of a veterans grave, and, should be punishable by law.
The Archbishop should spend less time protecting pedophile priests and more honoring our fallen heroes.