CHICAGO -- Advocates of saving an 1840s-era cemetery in the path of a proposed $15 billion expansion of O'Hare International Airport are preparing to seek a stay in federal court to block bulldozers if the Federal Aviation Administration approves the project.
In addition, the Illinois Conference of Churches has sent letters to the state's congressional delegation that frame the graveyard's preservation as a matter of religious freedom.
The conference's executive director wrote to U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., last week urging him to intervene with the FAA to save St. Johannes Cemetery. The letter expresses alarm "as to why the FAA has not exercised its regulatory authority to rein in Chicago's abuses of religious freedom."
German immigrants who helped settle DuPage County found their final rest in the cemetery, now affiliated with St. John's United Church of Christ in Bensenville. Its 1,300 graves sit yards from an active O'Hare runway.
The FAA is expected to rule on the proposed eight-year, 440-acre airport expansion this month. The project, meant to ease congestion at delay-prone O'Hare, requires Chicago to buy and raze more than 500 homes, displace some 2,600 residents and relocate nearly 200 businesses.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, working with attorneys for suburban foes of the project, plans to file a stay in federal court to stop bulldozers from moving into the cemetery, said Jared Leland, an attorney for the Washington, D.C., group.
"That is an immediate desecration of land," Leland said.
The Rev. David Anderson, executive director of the Springfield-based Illinois Conference of Churches, noted in his letter to congressmen that the Illinois legislature had approved a law to exempt the cemetery from the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
"The Illinois Conference of Churches regards the granting of an exemption to any government entity for expedient purposes of economic development to be a gross violation of the religious freedom secured by this nation's laws and constitution," Anderson wrote.
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