A property-tax fight between Cheltenham Township and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia over Holy Sepulchre Cemetery has now stretched past the decade mark, with no resolution in sight and roughly $683,000 in disputed 2026 taxes hanging in the balance. The case traces back to a 2014 corporate restructuring that moved the 200-acre cemetery out of the Archdiocese’s direct hands and into a church-controlled limited liability company — a shift that triggered Montgomery County to strip the property of its longstanding tax exemption.
A Church Financial Fix That Sparked a Decade of Litigation
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Archdiocese transferred Holy Sepulchre Cemetery to Philadelphia Catholic Cemeteries LLC in 2014 as part of an effort to improve the church’s financial situation. That move followed a 2013 decision by the Archdiocese to sign a 60-year, $89 million lease with a for-profit death-services corporation to operate 13 Delaware Valley cemeteries, Holy Sepulchre among them. The operator behind that lease today is the Florida-based Everstory Partners, which runs the cemeteries under the arrangement.
Church graveyards are typically exempt from property taxes, but once Holy Sepulchre moved into the LLC structure, Montgomery County revoked the exemption and notified the cemetery, per court filings, that it would begin collecting taxes for 2015. The county also pulled the tax exemption for Calvary Cemetery in Lower Merion around the same period, the report notes. Holy Sepulchre’s owners pushed back, appealing the decision and arguing that because the church still controls the LLC, the cemetery remains functionally under the nonprofit Archdiocese and should keep its religious exemption.
Dueling Appraisals and a Rising Assessment
The cemetery’s owners appealed Montgomery County’s $9.1 million assessment of the property, submitting their own appraisal that valued it at just $4.67 million. The gap didn’t shrink with time — the county’s assessment actually rose, pegging Holy Sepulchre’s value at $9.3 million in 2025 according to public records cited by the newspaper. That higher valuation underpins the roughly $683,000 the cemetery would owe in total property taxes this year, more than $500,000 of which is earmarked for local schools.
Montgomery County confirmed to the Inquirer that Holy Sepulchre began actually paying property taxes in 2025, marking a shift from a purely legal standoff to real money changing hands. It remains unclear, however, whether those payments cover the entire cemetery or only the smaller portion of land tied up in the parcel dispute — a detail the case has not resolved. Cheltenham Township, the Cheltenham School District, and the Lower Merion School District are all parties in the litigation, each with a financial stake in how the dispute shakes out.
Legal Fights Over the Judge, and Over Who’s Even Being Sued
The case has grown testier in recent years over issues well beyond the core tax question. A judge ordered Cheltenham to pay more than $43,000 of the cemetery’s legal fees after a dispute over which parcels were actually included in the suit — a claim Cheltenham raised years after the case began. Cheltenham, for its part, filed a motion last year to remove the judge, accusing the judge’s office of communicating inappropriately with the cemetery side, according to the article…