From the "You couldn't make this stuff up " department .The Newman drama comes to a close with the discovery that after all these years bodies really do decompose. You'd think we really didn't believe the ashes to ashes stuff. From the London Times.Please - enough of this ghoulish sideshow
For on Saturday they sulkily confirmed that since the great man never had a lead-lined coffin, he is all gone. “Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts” were recovered, but “there were no remains of the body... in the view of medical professionals in attendance, burial in a wooden coffin in a very damp site makes this kind of total decomposition unsurprising.” Indeed; though they do say that saints Cuthbert, Guthlac and Alphege, Edward the Confessor, Hugh of Lincoln, Teresa of Avila and St Bernadette all remained miraculously incorrupt, and in some cases smelling literally of roses. St Francis Xavier is said to have survived quicklime; Blessed Margaret of Metola allegedly still has eyelashes. Not every holy corpse is pleasant to the eye: when (against his relatives' wishes) the Vatican dug up Padre Pio this year they had to commission mask-makers to do him a more seemly face for the faithful to file past.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article4887190.ece
1 comment:
There is a God and this is proof. It was Newman's wish to be buried next to his friend and nobody can change that, not even the Roman Catholic Church. Some will say its coincidence but I think it's Divine Providence.
On the veneration of relics. I work at several Catholic Churches and I found this relic business to be more like Voodoo/Witchcraft. Of course I loved Exposition and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
Post a Comment