On the Incorruptible Bodies of Saints
By Dwight Longenecker|November 1st, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Dwight Longenecker, Senior Contributors
It may be that incorrupt bodies are proof of the possibility that spiritual practice has physical effects. When we understand how the mind and body work together, we may also start to understand why some saintly characters wind up being both dead as a doornail and fresh as a daisy.
On All Saints Day we will have on display in our church over twenty first class relics for the faithful to venerate. The most famous relics are those of saints whose mortal remains have not suffered the ordinary process of decomposition.
The People’s Pope Preserved
In March 2001 they dug up the body of Pope John XXIII. He’d been dead for thirty seven years. The present Pope decided John XXIII needed a new resting place since there were so many people who wanted to reverence his tomb in the crypt of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Furthermore, Pope John XXIII, son of peasants and known as ‘the peoples’ Pope’ is on the road to being declared a saint. One of the steps in the process is for the potential saint’s body to be exhumed for suitable identification.
Although Popes’ bodies are not fully embalmed they are ‘preserved’ with formalin to help keep the body for the few days of public viewing. Funeral director Joseph Watts commented to the New York Daily News, ‘He was embalmed right away, it was done by doctors, nothing but the best, and he was placed in the perfect place, the Catacombs.’ According to Watts, who has visited the tomb, the preservation of the pope’s body was probably the result of a number of factors. ‘The embalming fluid was formaldehyde-based with other chemicals…he was also in a triple-sealed casket—–a casket, an outer case, another outer case of cypress wood—–and that was in a marble crypt… There was no water or anything that could disintegrate [the body].’ Vincenzo Pascali, from the University of Rome said he doesn’t think Pope John’s preservation is very unusual. ‘It’s more common than you might think. The body of the Holy Father was well protected. Oxygen couldn’t get into the coffin and any in there would have been used up very quickly…[in the caskets] they used materials like lead and zinc which oxidise and slow the decomposition process,’ he added.
With her usual reserve, the Catholic Church denied that there was anything miraculous about the preservation of the Pope’s remains. The Vatican Information Service never used the words ‘miraculous’ or ‘incorrupt’ regarding the body of John XXIII. After the exhumation the Vatican Information Service headlined its story with great caution, simply saying, “Body of Blessed John XXIII is Remarkably Well Preserved.” This is in keeping with the usual Catholic official policy which does not rule out supernatural occurrences, but also does not declare an event miraculous until every natural explanation is exhausted.
Preservation Precedents
Because of the stories of incorruptibility people presumed to be saints were often exhumed and re-interred. The custom soon developed for exhumation to be part of the process for a person to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. Throughout the Middle Ages various saints’ bodies were considered to be incorrupt and the presence of an incorrupt body could be a magnet for many pilgrims with their offerings and donations to the church. Despite the damp climate, medieval Britain was especially liable to nurture saintly characters whose bodies didn’t decay. Among the English saints with incorrupt bodies were Cuthbert, Werburgh, Waltheof and Guthlac. Amongst them were two royal sisters, Etheldreda and Withburga, a king– Edward the Confessor, a bishop– Hugh of Lincoln and an Archbishop of Canterbury, Alphege. At the Reformation all their shrines were destroyed and the incorrupt bits of body dispersed. In a quirk of history however, when her shrine at Ely Cathedral was destroyed, the saintly Queen Etheldreda’s hand was preserved by a devout Catholic family. The still incorrupt hand was enshrined some four hundred years later when a little Catholic Church was re-established in Ely.
The accounts of saints’ bodies not decaying despite being buried for years continues right through to the present day. In a fascinating book Joan Carroll Cruz chronicles the stories with the kind of believing ‘objectivity’ which Catholics are famous for. In the book she relates some of the more amazing and gruesome details surrounding the incorruptible bodies of saints. The book abounds in details of preserved hearts, severed limbs, corpses that sit up and wink and healing perfumes that seep from holy bones. She tells how the body of St Teresa of Avila didn’t rot even though it was buried in wet mud; and how the bodies of St Paschal Baylon, St Francis Xavier and St John of the Cross all remained fresh and intact despite being covered in sacks of quicklime for months. Cruz tells of Blessed Peter of Gubbio, a fourteenth century monk, and Venerable Maria Vela, a sevententh century nun, whose voices were heard chanting with their brothers and sisters long after they were dead. St Clare of Montefalco was a holy nun from the thirteenth century who said to her sisters, ‘If you seek the cross of Christ, take my heart; there you will find the suffering Lord.’ After her death not only did her body remain incorrupt, but the sisters removed her heart and they found clearly imprinted on the cardiac tissue were figures representing a tiny crucifix complete with the five wounds of crucifixion.
Another extraordinary saint is Blessed Margaret of Metola. Margaret was blind, dwarfed, hunchbacked and lame, but that didn’t stop her from living a life of heroic service to the poor. She died in 1330, but in 1558 her remains had to be transferred because her coffin was rotting away. At the exhumation the witnesses were amazed to find that like the coffin, the clothes had rotted, but Margaret’s crippled body hadn’t. With typical understatement, Cruz reports, ‘The body of Blessed Margaret, which has never been embalmed, is dressed in a Dominican habit, and lies under the high altar of the Church of St Domenico at Citta-di-Castello, Italy. The arms of the body are still flexible, the eyelashes are present, and the nails are in place on the hands and feet. The colouring of the body has darkened slightly and the skin is dry and somewhat hardened, but by all standards the preservation can be considered a remarkable condition having endured for over six hundred and fifty years.’
Incredible Incorruptibles
It is easy enough to dismiss such stories as medieval miraculous nonsense, but two things make this untenable. First of all, the phenomena are among the most well-documented of any so-called miraculous occurrences. Among paranormal ephemera these prodigies are not only still visible, but the exhumations were witnessed with oaths and affidavits by ordinary working people as well as respectable professionals. Secondly, the accounts of incorruptible bodies are not a medieval phenomenon. They are a kooky part of Christian history from the first century right through to the twenty first.
The two most amazing modern accounts are of St Bernadette and St Charbel Makhlouf. St Bernadette was the shepherd girl who saw the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes. She went into a convent and died in 1879. She was buried in the crypt of the convent chapel. In 1909 a commission investigating her saintliness exhumed her body. The bishop and two doctors were the official witnesses. They were joined by two stonemasons and two carpenters. All of them swore beforehand to tell the truth of their findings. They found that the saint’s body was incorrupt. A nun who had witnessed the burial thirty years before noted that the only change was that the dead nun’s habit was damp.
Bernadette was re-buried and exhumed again in 1919. As before, both civil and religious witnesses were gathered under oath. The doctors who examined the body wrote, ‘when the coffin was opened the body appeared to be absolutely intact and odourless…there was no smell of putrefaction and none of those present experienced any discomfort.’ On a third exhumation in 1923 the body was still found in the same condition. At that point the body was opened and the internal organs were found to be supple. After forty six years, the doctor reported, ‘the liver was soft and almost normal in consistency.’
St Charbel Makhlouf was a Maronite monk from Lebanon. He died in 1898. In his life he seemed unremarkable except for his quiet and intense devotion to Christ. After his death for forty five nights strange lights appeared over his grave. Because forty five days is the traditional length of time for a body’s decomposition, the monastic authorities called for his exhumation. His body was found perfectly fresh despite the fact that recent rains had reduced the cemetery to a quagmire and the body was found floating in a muddy pool. Charbel’s body was re-clothed and transferred to a wooden coffin, but a strange blood-like oil kept exuding from his body—so much so that the clothes had to be changed twice a week. In 1927—twenty nine years after his death his still incorrupt body was examined, found to be totally flexible and incorrupt. It was then re-buried in a niche in the ancient abbey church. In 1950 pilgrims to the shrine noticed liquid seeping from the tomb. The coffin was opened again and the body was still incorrupt and exuding the sweat like substance which was collected and from which many miraculous cures were reported. The body remained incorrupt for sixty seven years, finally decaying in 1965.
Preposterous Preservations
Cruz reports no less than 102 stories of incorrupt bodies of Catholic saints. With so many supposedly incorrupt saints it is no wonder the devotees of Pope John XXIII suspected that the preservation of his remains might be a sign from heaven. Although the Catholic authorities do not deny the possibility of miraculous preservation of bodies, neither do they place much stock in it. According to Rome, the strange phenomena may confirm holiness, but on its own the un-natural preservation of bodies does not prove holiness. The authorities quite sensibly look to see what the person’s life was like.
Indeed, the phenomenon of un-naturally preserved bodies raises as many questions as it answers. If un-natural preservation is a sign of saintliness why aren’t all saints supernaturally preserved? Compare two very similar saints: Bernadette and Thérèse of Lisieux were both nineteenth century French girls who went into a convent and died of consumption at an early age. Bernadette’s body was incorrupt. Thérèse’s body, at her exhumation, was reduced to a skeleton in the normal way. Why should one saint be incorrupt and not the other?
The Catholic authorities are right to be cautious in equating incorruptibility with holiness. Indeed, the Catholic authorities were embarrassed when, in 1985, Cardinal Shuster’s body was discovered to be incorrupt after thirty one years in the grave. Many think Shuster was anything but a saint since he was a friend of Mussolini and supported fascism and Italy’s war with Abyssinia. Neither does the phenomenon of incorrupt bodies necessarily prove the claims of Catholicism. A famous yogi in California called Paramahansa Yogananda died in 1952 and his unembalmed body didn’t decay and emitted a beautiful fragrance. Maybe there are many incorrupt bodies of holy Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, but we’ll never know because these religions don’t have the unusual custom of digging up their suspected saints.
There are other quirky problems surrounding the phenomenon of incorrupt bodies of saints. While there is definitely something weird happening it is also true that the faithful have perpetuated the miracle stories and have sometimes helped the miracles along. In her defining book, Cruz is very honest in admitting that some of the incorrupt bodies were later embalmed. Some have been incorrupt for hundreds of years only to decay once they were moved—making one suspicious that the airtight original container may have helped preserve the body. Other incorrupt bodies have been spliced together with bits of string and wire. In some cases the darkened faces and hands are covered with silver or wax, ostensibly for cosmetic purposes, but could it be that they are really covering a skeleton?
Despite the irrational elements and the faithful ‘helping’ the miracle along there is enough evidence of remarkable occurrences surrounding the incorruptibles. St Isidore and St John of the Cross are two final examples which illustrate the unsettling events and show that despite all other explanations the incorruptibles are probably one of the best documented examples of the miraculous. St Isidore was a farm labourer who died in the year 1130. He was buried directly in the earth without tomb or coffin. Forty years later, prompted by a dream, they exhumed his body to move it to a more worthy tomb. An eyewitness recorded that Isidore’s body ‘looked like it had just died although it had been lying in the earth for forty years.’ In 1622 the body was exhumed a second time before many witnesses. Once again it was perfectly fresh and emitted ‘a heavenly odour’. One of the witnesses was the King’s minister who signed the document attesting what they had all seen.
When St John of the Cross died in 1591 he was buried in a vault beneath the floor of the church. When the tomb was opened nine months later the body was fresh and intact, and when a finger was amputated to use as a relic the body bled as it would from a normal person. When the tomb was opened for a second time nine months later the body was still fresh despite the fact that it had been covered with a layer of quicklime. In 1859 and 1909 the body was exhumed again and still found to be fresh and incorrupt. The last exhumation of the relic was in 1955 when St John of the Cross’s human body, after nearly four hundred years was still ‘moist and flexible’ although the skin ‘was slightly discoloured.’
As with most paranormal phenomena, the existence of incorrupt bodies has not been studied seriously by the scientific community. As the phenomena exists outside Catholicism it may be that the incorrupt bodies are proof of the possibility that spiritual practice has physical effects. In a devoutly religious person the spiritual practice of prayer and meditation is merged with the physical discipline of asceticism and abstinence. As a result the physical and the spiritual become inter-mingled. Perhaps in some cases this inter-penetration of the spiritual with the physical so overwhelms the person’s body as to preserve it from natural corruption. If we take seriously the possibility of the psycho-physical relationship we may begin to explain why some bodies do not decay despite the fact that the individual has died of a noxious disease, was not embalmed and was buried for decades in damp conditions with other corpses that rotted naturally. When we understand how the mind and body work together we may also start to understand why some saintly characters wind up being both dead as a doornail and fresh as a daisy.
This essay was first published by the Fortean Times.
