ABSTRACT
'It is of the utmost importance and it cannot be stressed enough that the consultation with the [church leadership] and the eventual agreement must avoid even the thought of expropriation; it must be an agreement or, in this case, a voluntary offer. We must underline what advantages such an agreement would have for the upper and the lower clergy.' 2 This quotation comes from a position paper on the ownership of cemeteries from the State Office of Church Affairs in Hungary, written in 1969. 3 The authors of the paper argued that the expropriation of cemeteries, the majority of which at that point were still church property, would have created too much tension in the relationship between the churches and the state in the late 1960s. Such a radical change in ownership would also have upset the population and it would have overstrained the administration as well. At the same time, the authors of the paper argued that priests and pastors could and should be persuaded to consider offering cemeteries to local councils and if such an offer was made, the councils should take the cemeteries over. According to the scheme, the churches would have been financially compensated: they would have received 10 to 25 per cent of their projected income from graveyards for the following 10 years. If the financial incentive were not strong enough to move priests and pastors to offer their cemeteries to the state, the State Office of Church Affairs also suggested a heavier emphasis on prescribing the modernization of cemeteries: build a road from the village to the cemetery; make sure the cemetery was fenced off, closed and guarded after visiting hours; build facilities for storing dead bodies until the funeral; and, if there were no hospital within a certain distance, build facilities appropriate for carrying out dissections that might be necessary if the cause of death was uncertain. Investments in facilities on this scale could have financially ruined local parishes in Hungary at the end of the 1960s.
