A few weeks ago, having a few spare hours on a Sunday afternoon, my girlfriend and I visited Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside. Part of a complex of three contiguous Catholic cemeteries covering an area as large as a small suburb, it includes the largest Catholic mausoleum in the world - a towering structure with two long wings, each three stories tall, its walls and alcoves filled with tombs. Completed in the late 1950s, it was one of the last beautiful ecclesiastical structures built in Chicagoland, with a hauntingly dark chapel and a stately Gothic tower at its center.
Its wings, unfortunately, are filled with a great number of modern stained glass windows and ugly statues, but the quantity of artwork nearly compensates for the lack of quality. Almost every saint, sacred place, biblical story, doctrine, apparition and devotion imaginable has some space dedicated to it; portions of Holy Scripture and the wisdom of the Church Fathers are written in calligraphy on the walls; countless relics are displayed in cases embedded in the masonry. I know of no other place in the area in which a curious neophyte might receive a comprehensive Catholic education, simply by walking around it.
Visitors are advised to bring earplugs; a painfully high-pitched squeal is audible in many parts of the mausoleum; presumably this is some sort of animal repellant.