"The greatest penalty of excommunication became exclusion from that space: the only space in which one could be buried as a human being. To be cast out meant to be buried like a dog."

Booked: The Living Dead

Timothy Shenk  March 10, 2016

"Gradually churches came to have churchyards which gathered together the dead of the community over the generations. The greatest penalty of excommunication became exclusion from that space: the only space in which one could be buried as a human being. To be cast out meant to be buried like a dog. So in the old order there was only one place for the body—the churchyard—to which access was guarded by ecclesiastical authorities who also attended to the dying and prayed for their souls. The thousand-year-old regime was one in which the dead belonged to priests and not as in classical antiquity to families or on occasion to the state."