Planes thunder overhead, sometimes less than a minute apart. Trucks pull in and out of the FedEx shipping terminal, a stone’s throw from St. Johannes Cemetery. About a mile away, bulldozers are busy moving earth, at work on a $15 billion expansion of O’Hare International Airport that threatens to put a runway right through the center of the 156-year-old graveyard.
After ordering a halt to construction on Sept. 30, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., last week allowed work to resume. The court did not rule on O’Hare opponents’ argument that it’s unconstitutional to move the cemetery to make way for airport expansion, and Chicago has promised not to move the 1,300 graves until that question is resolved.
On Thursday, however, lawyers will ask a federal judge in Chicago to stop work again. Expansion opponents say that without such an order, there’s nothing to stop the city from condemning the property in order to claim title–a necessary step to qualify for federal funding for the project.
City officials say the expansion cannot go forward without moving St. Johannes because a crucial new runway cannot be routed away from the cemetery.
“Dead people always seem to get in the way of the living,” said Helen Sclair, a longtime Chicago historian known around the city as the “cemetery lady,” whom the city has consulted. “But if this cemetery is not moved, it would inhibit the development of the Midwest.”
Opponents say the runway can be built elsewhere.
“It’s not just about moving graves, it’s a matter of religious principle,” said Rev. David Anderson, executive director of the Illinois Conference of Churches. “This is still an active cemetery. It’s still consecrated, sacred ground.”
Lawyers for St. John’s United Church of Christ in Bensenville say that by moving the graves of the German immigrants who settled suburban Chicago, the Federal Aviation Administration and the city would violate the church’s 1st Amendment right to exercise its religious beliefs.
They also say state legislators discriminated against the church when they passed a law in 2003 excluding the cemetery from another state law that prohibits government from putting “a substantial burden” on religious practice.
St. John’s is part of an old-line national Protestant movement of the United Church of Christ. Some church members believe the bodies of their ancestors will rise from their holy place at the cemetery and be reunited with their souls in heaven. To disturb them, they argue, could hinder their eternal fate.
Relocating the cemetery “is like moving the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or the black rock in Mecca,” said Joseph Karaganis, an attorney for O’Hare expansion opponents. “This holy ground is the basic foundation of their religion.”
At the crux of the cemetery backers’ argument are the federal and state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts. Following the model of other states and a federal law, Illinois passed the act in 1998 that says government must have a strong reason to pass laws or policies that impose upon religious groups or acts.
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But in 2003, the Illinois legislature passed the O’Hare Modernization Act, giving Chicago the authority to move ahead with expansion plans, including condemning and acquiring property. That measure effectively stripped the cemetery of its legal protections under the state’s religious restoration act.
“It was an outrageous move,” Karaganis said. “They violated their own law.”
The city hopes to reduce flight delays at O’Hare by removing three runways, building four new ones and extending two others. The FAA estimates this will allow the airport to accommodate 1.2 million annual flights efficiently, up from about 974,000 today.
“This is about location, not religion,” Roderick Drew, spokesman for the O’Hare Modernization Program, explaining why the city is targeting the cemetery.
Still, the government and surrounding suburbs must show good reason before imposing such a burden on a religious group, said Tom Berg, a professor at University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis.
“It must show a `compelling interest,'” said Berg, who filed a legal brief in the O’Hare case on behalf of 24 religious and civil rights organizations. “Not just any old reason, but a compelling one.”
Flight delays and a need for expansion are not compelling reasons, the opponents’ attorneys argue, because alternative plans could be devised to spare the cemetery.
But legal scholars say that besides debunking the compelling-reason argument, opponents’ attorneys will have to show that the cemetery is being targeted for its religious beliefs.
“They will have to show discriminatory intent,” said Andrew Koppelman, a Northwestern University legal expert. “The city argues `location, location,’ and that looks to be a plausible argument.”
An airport project spokesman said the city has yet to begin an appraisal process–the first step in acquisition. But expansion opponents are wary. The city already has the authority to buy and knock down hundreds of nearby businesses and homes, they said.
Chicago officials hope “that they can take and destroy enough of Bensenville and Elk Grove Village that we walk away from the fight,” said Elk Grove Village Mayor Craig Johnson. “It’s not going to happen.”
Both locally and nationally, there is precedent for moving cemeteries to make room for public projects.
In the late 1950s, nearly 1,500 graves at Lutheran-run Concordia Cemetery were moved to build the Eisenhower Expressway. It took two years and cost the city nearly $1.5 million.
In St. Louis, 607 graves were moved in 2002 and 2003 to make way for taxiways in an expanding Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
In Atlanta, however, the ongoing $6 billion expansion of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport has spared two cemeteries–one a family burial ground and another founded in 1877 by a Baptist church. Airport officials say they worked around the cemeteries to avoid possible political and governmental disruptions to expansion.
Chicago officials vow to exercise care when moving the remains at St. Johannes. The operation would be meticulously slow and expensive. Because most of the remains are not in modern vaults, they are scattered in the grave sites and have become decomposed parts of the dusty earth. Unearthing and moving them will require the skill of archeologists, cemetery industry experts say.
The bodies were buried in order of death and from east to west, the route that the church believes will be the return of Christ. They would have to be moved in that order to preserve the integrity of the graveyard, experts say.
“It’s messy to think of what they have to do,” said Sclair, the Chicago expert who has consulted on reburials.
St. John’s church members say they have suffered a forced move before. In 1952, as budding O’Hare expanded, Chicago workers moved the church 3 miles west on flat-bed trailers equipped with tires from World War II bombers.
Helen Runge, 81, a lifelong churchgoer, said her family lost its farm in the process. Runge now frets about the airport again taking land that is precious to her.
Her husband, Erwin, was buried in the cemetery in 1990, near their baby son, his parents and in-laws. Runge plans someday to rest next to him at St. Johannes, and is counting on divine intervention to make it possible.
“I’m very confident,” she said. “With the Lord on our side, how can we lose?”
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