Faith and civic leaders gathered in south-west Sydney on Monday to celebrate the opening of first crown cemetery in New South Wales in more than 80 years. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
NSW Premier Chris Minns, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP, and representatives of Orthodox and other Christian churches, along with Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist and Baha’i leaders were among the many dignitaries at the opening of Macarthur Memorial Park, Varroville.
The cemetery spans 113 hectares of semi-bushland landscape. It will accommodate 136,000 burial plots plus thousands of cremation niches, resolving an urgent need for new burial space in Sydney’s rapidly growing and diverse population.
Operated by the not-for-profit Catholic Cemeteries and Crematoria Trust (CCC), the memorial park features a large interfaith chapel, 250-seat function centre and a café, 20 dedicated burial areas for specific religious and ethnic groups, six lakes and eight kilometres of walking and bike tracks.
The occasion was a major milestone for the state and the faith and wider community, coming after a decade-long fight for the Catholic Church to continue offering burial services across Sydney.
Nearly 20,000 people signed the interfaith “Save Our Graves” petition over the issue in 2021.
Last June, the state’s Parliament passed legislation confirming a two-operator model for the Crown cemeteries sector in NSW. The other operator is the state government.
“It’s incredibly important to make space to farewell our loved ones in accordance with their custom, and if the Government and this Trust hadn’t acted we would have run out of burial space by 2050 with some faith-based sites filling up much sooner,” Mr Minns said in his address to the assembly.
Archbishop Fisher told the gathering that the historic day marked a new stage in the collaboration between Catholic Cemeteries and the various faith communities of Sydney and beyond, as well as between “Church and state”.
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Cemetery opening marks “new stage” of collaboration between faiths (By Marilyn Rodrigues, The Catholic Weekly)
