Pittsburgh Cemeteries

Tag: Christ

  • Clergy Monument, St. Peter’s Cemetery (Arlington)

    Clergy plot

    St. Peter’s Cemetery is a small German Catholic cemetery in Arlington. (The German Lutherans have a cemetery, St. Paul’s, right behind this one in Mount Oliver, and they seem almost to have chosen their patron saints confrontationally.) This elaborate monument presides over the priests’ plot in the cemetery.

    Clergy plot
    Clergy monument
    Clergy monument
    The Good Shepherd
    Inscription

    “For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God.” (Job 19:25–26, the English translation taken from the Douay-Rheims version.)

    “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 89:14 in the Vulgate numbering, or 90:12 in the numbering used by most Bibles today. The English is from the King James Version; the Douay-Rheims version, following the Vulgate, is quite different.)

    Clergy monument

  • Statue of Christ in St. Michael’s Cemetery

    Statue of Christ

    St. Michael’s was a German parish, but it must have had a small Hungarian contingent as well, or it shared its cemetery with a Hungarian parish. This statue of Christ blessing visitors as they enter the cemetery (it is placed in the middle of a circle at the entrance) stands on a base with the inscription EGO SUM RESURRECTIO ET VITA in Latin and three other languages: German, English, and Hungarian.

    Statue in circle
    I am the resurrection and the life
    Ego sum resurrectio et vita
    Hungarian and German
    Rear of the statue
    Full length

  • William J. Burns Mausoleum, Calvary Cemetery

    William J. Burns mausoleum

    A fine temple of the “modern Ionic” order (Ionic columns with the volutes at the four corners) with a large statue of Christ standing above the pediment. It has not escaped festooning with artificial flowers.

    William J. Burns mausoleum

  • Purpura Monument, Calvary Cemetery

    Purpura monument

    A classical gateway with fluted Doric columns frames a Sacred Heart statue. Tablets for two branches of the Purpura family flank the gateway. This is one of those curious combinations we often see in Catholic cemeteries: ostentatiously classical taste applied to traditional Catholic religious symbolism.

  • Catanzaro Monument, Calvary Cemetery

    Catanzaro monument

    Perhaps Dan Brown could recommend a Harvard symbologist to unravel the strands of symbolism here. Christ (holding a bouquet of artificial flowers, because he stood still too long in a Catholic cemetery) is stepping down from a ruined Ionic temple, his left hand seeming to gesture toward the ruins behind him, as if he has something to tell us about them. We could say that the ruined temple represents shattered and broken paganism, and Christ shows the way forward. Or perhaps, in spite of the Greek style, the ruins represent the Temple in Jerusalem, where not one stone was left upon another, and Christ emerges fresh from that ancient tradition, stepping forward to bring the real Temple to us.

    Catanzaro monument