Posted on 08/20/2005 7:53:30 PM PDT by Coleus
Who abandoned 'Cecilia'?
| Saturday, April 16, 2005 |
The white cloth in the dirt caught the priest's eye.
A spring sun was shining. His schedule was open, so the Rev. Michael Ward stepped from his rectory and headed across the courtyard to the winter-scarred garden by the side door of St. Cecilia's Roman Catholic Church in Kearny.
It was only a few days before Easter Sunday, and Ward, the pastor of St. Cecilia's, wanted the new plantings arranged just right. Tulips here. Daffodils there.
But what was this white cloth in the dirt?
Ward bent over, reached out a hand, and pulled. "Then I saw something," he recalls.
A face. A baby girl. Dead.
In the case files at the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office in Jersey City, she is known as "Baby Jane Doe," an unsolved infant death. At St. Cecilia's, she is known as "Baby Cecilia," a tragedy that brought people together enough to give her a proper Catholic funeral todayat 10:30 a.m.
The unexpected intrusion of death into our everyday lives inevitably changes us and makes us see things differently. But the death of a baby - a baby buried in a church garden - made people look inside their hearts in ways they might not have expected.
At St. Cecilia's, churchgoers stop by the garden almost every day, Ward says. They stare in silence at the red cedar chips that cover the spot by the brick wall where Ward pulled up the white cloth. They fold their hands and pray in silence.
In the first days after the March 22 discovery, mourners left palm crosses - four of them remain. Others left candles in glass jars - three are still there.
Someone left a pot of yellow tulips. Someone else, a pot of lilies. Yet another mourner laid a white teddy bear on the soil with blue, plastic rosary beads.
Ward, 40, ordained a priest eight years ago after a short career with Merrill Lynch, says the discovery of the baby made him to reflect more deeply on the deaths of his parents. It also made him to wonder about the mindset of the person who dug a hole and left Baby Cecilia in the church garden, near a spot where a memorial plaque to a deceased priest declares: "You are nearer to God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth."
"Whoever did this was trying to do something right," Ward said.
Five miles away, in the offices of Hudson County Prosecutor Edward De Fazio, the trail of Baby Cecilia's mother and father has grown cold. And clues to how and why she died also are few. There are no witnesses, no arrests.
"It's difficult to fathom how the people were thinking that did this," De Fazio said. "In my opinion, they were desperate."
An autopsy determined that the baby was white, possibly Hispanic, with brown hair. She weighed 8 pounds, 4 ounces, was almost 18 inches long, and was only 2 days old when she died.
But how she died is still a mystery.
There were no bruises on the baby's body to indicate she might have been beaten, no broken blood vessels in her eyes to indicate she had been suffocated or strangled.
"We're still waiting for a toxicology report," said Mike D'Andrea, an assistant prosecutor who runs the homicide division.
"We're not treating it as a crime at this point. We're treating this as a tragedy," he said.
But even with so many unanswered questions, D'Andrea feels confident he can draw a few conclusions about the mindset of those who buried Baby Cecilia.
"Obviously the parent or parents are religious," he said. "They chose the sanctified ground to inter their child. From that, we can conclude that they might belong to an ethnic community that values holy mother church."
But are they Catholic? "Who can say?" D'Andrea said.
Another mystery is when the baby was buried - or how long she was in the ground before Ward discovered her body.
"We're not sure of the time lapse between the birth of the child and the actual burial," De Fazio said.
One thing De Fazio seems clear about is that Baby Cecilia was not born in a hospital. The suture of her umbilical cord seems like the work of someone who was not a doctor or nurse. "It did not look like a hospital setting," De Fazio said.
But whoever buried Baby Cecilia thought enough to pay attention to what she wore to her makeshift grave - white socks trimmed with white flowers and green leaves, a tiny, white T-shirt, blue overalls with yellow stripes, a hat and a wrapping of a white, 3-by-4-foot blanket, the investigator's records show.
A corner of that white blanket protruded from the ground and caught Ward's eye on that spring afternoon as he leaned over his garden and pondered where to place his spring plants that a group of teenagers would later plant.
"It's a sad occasion," Ward said. "But it has brought people together."
It was now another sunny day - not unlike the one on which Baby Cecilia was found. But instead of planting a garden, Ward was planning Baby Cecilia's funeral in his parish of 1,500 families where Masses are celebrated in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
A funeral home donated Baby Cecilia's coffin. A monument company donated the baby's tombstone for her plot at Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington. Several people donated new clothes for her to be buried in.
Ward paused as he ran through the litany of good works, donations and goodwill in his town and beyond, then smiled at what has happened.
"God can make something good out of something bad," he said.
Outside, three parish staff members gathered on the rectory steps for a coffee break and a chance to take in the spring sunshine.
"At least she wasn't put in the trash," said Terri Hicks, a secretary.
Across the courtyard, by the garden, a man in a Yankee baseball hat stopped, bowed his head, then made the sign of the cross. Two women stopped and held hands in silence.
"She looked like a doll," said Elliott Peace, who handles the church repairs and maintenance and hurried to the spot after Ward's discovery.
The others nodded, then fell silent.
What else could be said anyway? One rumor is that the mother was an illegal immigrant who feared getting caught and deported. But no one is really sure what happened.
Finally, Josephine Brost spoke. Her thoughts were not about what happened, but what lies ahead for her community.
"The way we figure it," she said, "St. Cecilia's has a new guardian angel."
On Friday, the retreat sponsered by Seminarians for Life and Priests for Life held a Face the Truth display along Schulyer Ave in Kearny -- not for from the one of the Archdiocese of Newark offices in Kearny.
[Face the Truth is like a LifeChain, except a number of posters are the same and set up gives the best impact for passing motorists -- spreading out signs as need be. It does use graphic images.]
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