The anguish of Fr John O'Connor at the unkempt state of Milltown Cemetery is easily understandable.
The vista presented by this weed-choked, rubbish-strewn 50-acre site running south from the Falls to the M1 is genuinely shocking.
With graves crammed in higgledy-piggledy and no paths between them, this desolate expanse of lurching headstones and ghastly thickets of indeterminate growth would make an apt location for a low-budget horror-flick.
It occurs in passing to common-sense atheists that it's a strange way for people who affect belief in an after life to treat the remains of their loved ones.
Fr O'Connor, administrator of the cemetery on behalf of the Down and Connor Diocese since 1979, pointed out in yesterday's Irish News that few of the 50,000 individual plots are regularly tended.
In fact, it looks at a glance like a great number have long since been abandoned.
An Ace Scheme which helped keep the place tolerably tidy was withdrawn in 1989. An appeal has now been made to the Lottery.
The diocese awaits the outcome of a city council survey of Belfast burial facilities.
In the meantime, argues Fr O'Connor, it is unfair to contrast the state of Milltown with the well-kept, rates-maintained City Cemetery nearby.
This is a reasonable point, and hints at an answer to the problem. Should the diocese not hand the cemetery over to the council?
In most other towns - Derry, for example - burial facilities are provided by the local council without it occurring to Catholics that the arrangement is in any way improper.
A decision by the diocese to hand the keys over to City Hall would bring an end to a 120 year-old saga which throws fascinating light on the religious formation of Belfast.
The man who brought Milltown Cemetery into being was Bishop Patrick Dorrian, one of the most significant figures in Belfast history.
Intellectually formidable, politically astute and an organiser of genius, Dorrian began the transformation of the Catholic Church in the city after taking over from the timid and reclusive Cornelius Denvir in 1860.
His mission was to impose the authority of the institutional church on its 'own' people, while asserting its separateness from surrounding Protestant _ more specifically, Presbyterian _ society.
This was the perspective in which Dr Dorrian examined a proposal by the Whig-dominated town council in 1866 for a burial ground for all citizens on newly acquired land off the Falls Road.
Mindful of the sensitivities of its divided city, the council offered 10 acres of the proposed City Cemetery for Catholics and 17 for Protestants, the remaining nine acres to be open to all comers.
Dr Dorrian said no, making the (questionable) point that while Catholics had to be buried in consecrated ground, he was debarred under Canon Law from consecrating ground over which a non-Catholic body retained rights. In effect, he wanted legal ownership of the Catholic area.
In an effort to placate him, the council had a six-foot trench dug around the intended Catholic area, an undergound brick wall built and the trench covered over. The wall is still there.
Dr Dorrian was unimpressed, citing the possibility of a Catholic who had made a will stipulating that he or she was to be buried in the Catholic plot then becoming a Protestant and dying: would the Church have a legal right to turn the ex-Catholic corpse away?
The council's dithery response prompted Dr Dorrian to organise a massive fund-raising drive for the money to buy adjacent land at Milltown.
Twenty thousand people turned out to mark the opening of the cemetery in 1870 (not 1869, as Fr O'Connor suggests).
An illuminated address presented to Dr Dorrian by a group of Catholic businessmen expressed relief that 'We are no longer exposed to the danger of being interred in desecrated gound and having our bones disturbed by unhallowed hands'.
Thus did Milltown Cemetery come into existence. Many may agree that the time is propitious to begin a new chapter in its story.
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