Cemetery Tour: All Saints

Some of the most beautiful and meaningful art is most poignantly expressed in cemeteries. Both nature and human craft are there bent to bear solemn witness to lofty lessons of mortality, faith, and love.

Visitors who enter All Saints Catholic Cemetery on its curving lanes are duly impressed with its sheer scale. It reaches over 257 acres in a park-style well tended landscape. Your Catholic Church Tours guide knows his way around these acres! Through funerary ministries and extensive publishing, he has developed a unique understanding of mourning rituals, this cemetery’s textured history and the cohesiveness of its notable features.  

In addition to the particular plots of more than 132,000 burials, notable areas include:

• The first Interment Chapel in the Archdiocese of Chicago Cemetery system.
• The expansive Community Mausoleum, a flared wall edifice replete with massive dalle de verre windows.
• The Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Marian Shrines.
• The Immaculate Heart of Mary Garden Mausoleum with its 75-foot long black granite fountain invested with 40 jets and 50-foot tall tower with mosaics of the Virgin Mary.
• The Cremation Garden of Saint Francis, first of its kind in the Archdiocese.
• The burial site of His Eminence Francis Eugene Cardinal George, O.M.I., eighth Archbishop of Chicago.

Your guide will meet you at the original cemetery on the East side of the US Highway 45 inside the entry gate. This portion was consecrated in 1923.  We will next explore the west cemetery, opened in 1954.   

BONUS: Because All Saints Cemetery is situated so close to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and because the Virgin is known to have quashed a culture of death, we are providing the opportunity for a guided visit of the Shrine after the cemetery grounds.  You may like to picnic on the accommodating Shrine grounds, make a chapel visit or purchase something from the well stocked gift shop.

Transportation is on your own.