Apparently a 9-year-old who passed away recently was an avid supporter of German soccer club Borussia Dortmund. One of his last wishes was that his tombstone would be engraved with a soccer ball, the club logo and the club’s slogan Echte Liebe (real love.)
But the local Dortmund Catholic parish did initially not allow the parents to put up a tombstone with the design, claiming it wouldn’t fit the graveyard’s etiquette.. Only after a quite bureaucratic back and forth did the Catholic parish agree to let the tombstone have the soccer theme, but only if the parents added a dove (the most corny and cliched Christian tombstone engraving.) I hope that the language used to communicate with the family of the deceased child was different.
And the, again, very bureaucratic press release posted on Borussia’s facebook page stressed that this was only an exception. Yeah, don’t want all those 9-year-old’s tombstones polluting your neat cemetery.
I hate it when the church gets bureaucratic.
(Disclaimer: I am a supporter of Borussia Dortmund and of a protestant belief that can only work on a grass-roots level.)
Thoughts?