Vatican’s secret, and deadly, project to mummify saints
Nov 1, 2014 18:01:45 GMT -5
Post by Berean on Nov 1, 2014 18:01:45 GMT -5
Vatican’s secret, and deadly, project to mummify saints
By Theresa Potenza
Modal Trigger
Vatican’s secret, and deadly, project to mummify saints
Pope John XXIII, mummified and on display
Inspired by Ancient Egypt, the Vatican embarked on a 40-year quest to preserve the remains of its holy adherents — including one of its latest saints, Pope John XXIII.
The spiritual making of a saint is rooted in law, bureaucracy and, of course, faith.
The physical making of a saint is something else entirely.
On April 27, Popes John XXIII and John Paul II will be granted sainthood by Pope Francis. It will be a day to honor two of the Catholic Church’s most popular leaders, the “Good Pope” who served only five years, and the superstar who toured the world and spoke out against communism, becoming the second-longest-serving pope in history.
It’s also an opportunity to display to the world what has become a tourist attraction under the Vatican: the body of John XXIII, perfectly preserved since his death in 1963, entombed in a glass coffin.
The pope’s body is the most prominent example of a four-decade experiment by the Church to sustain its holy relics. With Ancient Egypt’s mummification process as inspiration, the Vatican had an elite team of embalmers preserve 31 “saints, beatified, and servants of God” between 1975 and 2008.
The project, which tragically proved fatal to many of those who worked on it, is a bridge between heaven and earth. “The bodies and body parts of these holy individuals,” says one embalmer, “kept like a work of art.”
The Incorruptible
The Catholic belief of “incorruptibility” holds that if a body does not decay after death, the person is holy. It takes two miracles to become a saint; the Church once allowed a perfect corpse to count as one.
Incorruptibility is no longer a miracle, however, perhaps because so many tried to help God along. Oil and herbs were inserted into the muscle cavities of some older popes, for instance.
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, the Vatican used a wrapping technique similar to what was believed to have been applied to Jesus. It failed miserably. Only days after his death, his nose fell off, and a Swiss Guard fainted due to the stench while he was guarding the body.
Pope John XXIII followed the reign of Pope Pius XII. After his death, John was treated with a simple formalin solution and placed in an airtight, layered coffin. It worked remarkably well — though the Church wouldn’t find that out until decades later.
But the Vatican has bigger problems than the bodies of popes. Across the world, the hands, heads and feet of saints are venerated — an extension of the idea of the Incarnation. Just as God became man in Jesus, so the holiness of his greatest followers adheres in the matter which made up their bodies. All these relics face the dangers of decomposition.
In 1975, Monsignor Gianfranco Nolli, director of the Vatican’s Egyptian Museum, had an inspiration. After examining the excellent state of 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummies, he believed the Church could advance its treatments of popes and saints for the same effect.
The Vatican put together a team of researchers, which worked to update and improve the mummification process. Medical surgeons, pathologists, radiologists, anthropologists and microbiologists came up with a conservation treatment and began treating the newly deceased and bodies and body parts dating back as far as the 3rd century.
Savior of Saints
The team was called by many congregations to treat bodies of saints that had not previously been embalmed at the time of death and were later found in a state of decay.
Such was the case with the body of St. Clare of Assisi, who died in the 13th century and was found by the nuns working there in 1987 in a casket full of moths.
Clare, one of the first followers of Saint Francis of Assisi, founded the Order of Poor Ladies, nuns who tended to the impoverished; today they are known as the Poor Clares.
She had been treated with primitive methods when she died in 1253, with some herbs inserted into her muscles and wrapped in cotton. The cotton proved to be damaging, leaving the casket damp and inviting insects. For that reason, most holy people are now wrapped in linen.
The conservation team bathed the saint’s bone fragments in a series of solutions for months at a time to render her immune to parasites.
The team also was called to treat the foot of St. Teresa of Avila, a nun famous for her visions of Jesus and her devotion to the poor in Spain. Her followers were called “discalced,” or shoeless, for their habit of wearing simple sandals, not shoes.
St. Teresa, who died in 1582, is an example of how obsessed earlier Catholics were with relics of the flesh. After her death, a priest cut off her left hand, from which he took a finger, wearing it around his neck for the rest of his life.
Followers later removed her heart, right arm, right foot and a piece of jaw to display as relics in various sites.
Much of her ended up in Rome. But in 1984, the church she was displayed in was robbed; the glass case containing her relics was shattered and her foot was stolen. It was returned days later wrapped in a communist newspaper.
The embalming team chemically treated the foot and placed it back in the reliquary, perhaps giving St. Teresa a bit of peace.
In sacristies and other back rooms of churches, the team was sometimes given a pile of bones that they had to reconstruct before the sterilization process began. The scientific process was of course not without a bit of bureaucracy. In front of the body upon the opening of each casket they had to swear and sign an affidavit in the presence of the local bishop and a lawyer that they would not ruin or destroy the sacred body.
Even so, the process was sometimes remarkably casual. At times, team members stored relics in their own homes. One doctor assigned to treat the body of St. Fernando III, King of Spain, who died in 1252, transported his sacred vestments to Rome and brought them to the local dry cleaner.
That said, an embalmer who worked on the project says it truly was God’s work. She says sometimes the deceased helped them in their work, sending them messages.
Her most memorable job was embalming St. Don Luigi Orione, an Italian priest known for his work with the poor and orphans. She tried to change his shoes as she prepared his body for burial — but every time she left the body alone, the new shoes mysteriously had been removed and replaced with his old poor man’s shoes.
Preserving a Pope
The team’s most important task was Pope John XXIII. The pope, popular for his jovial nature, was considered pivotal because of his convening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, which modernized the Mass, bringing in contemporary music and local languages instead of Latin.
After his death, he was credited for curing an Italian nun, who prayed to him when she developed a stomach tumor. Her healing, with no medical explanation, was his first miracle.
In 2000, Pope John Paul II had him exhumed to be declared “blessed,” part of the progression to sainthood. The airtight coffin had left him virtually undisturbed, and the embalming team wanted to keep it that way.
After the pope’s internal organs were removed and analyzed, the body was placed in a stainless-steel tub for several weeks in a solution of formalin and alcohol, then neutralized for several weeks.
His body then undertook a series of baths in assorted solutions for months at a time, including various mixtures of ethanol, methanol, phenol, camphor, nitrobenzene, turpentine and benzoic acid.
Finally the body was bandaged in linen cloths saturated with a solution of mercury bichloride and ethanol. Then a second team ensconced him with wax on his face and hands. The entire process took about a year.
The Church decided not to rebury Pope John XXIII, instead putting him on display for pilgrims. More than 25,000 people visit St. Peter’s Basilica every day, and many faithful still believe the incorrupt state of his body is a miracle.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a legal body inside the Vatican that analyzes witness accounts and oversees the legal measures required for sainthood, failed to recognize the pope’s bodily condition as a miracle — perhaps because the airtight container does not count as an act of God.
But Pope Francis waived the second miracle requirement, believing that John’s good works were reason enough.
Continued at link
By Theresa Potenza
Modal Trigger
Vatican’s secret, and deadly, project to mummify saints
Pope John XXIII, mummified and on display
Inspired by Ancient Egypt, the Vatican embarked on a 40-year quest to preserve the remains of its holy adherents — including one of its latest saints, Pope John XXIII.
The spiritual making of a saint is rooted in law, bureaucracy and, of course, faith.
The physical making of a saint is something else entirely.
On April 27, Popes John XXIII and John Paul II will be granted sainthood by Pope Francis. It will be a day to honor two of the Catholic Church’s most popular leaders, the “Good Pope” who served only five years, and the superstar who toured the world and spoke out against communism, becoming the second-longest-serving pope in history.
It’s also an opportunity to display to the world what has become a tourist attraction under the Vatican: the body of John XXIII, perfectly preserved since his death in 1963, entombed in a glass coffin.
The pope’s body is the most prominent example of a four-decade experiment by the Church to sustain its holy relics. With Ancient Egypt’s mummification process as inspiration, the Vatican had an elite team of embalmers preserve 31 “saints, beatified, and servants of God” between 1975 and 2008.
The project, which tragically proved fatal to many of those who worked on it, is a bridge between heaven and earth. “The bodies and body parts of these holy individuals,” says one embalmer, “kept like a work of art.”
The Incorruptible
The Catholic belief of “incorruptibility” holds that if a body does not decay after death, the person is holy. It takes two miracles to become a saint; the Church once allowed a perfect corpse to count as one.
Incorruptibility is no longer a miracle, however, perhaps because so many tried to help God along. Oil and herbs were inserted into the muscle cavities of some older popes, for instance.
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, the Vatican used a wrapping technique similar to what was believed to have been applied to Jesus. It failed miserably. Only days after his death, his nose fell off, and a Swiss Guard fainted due to the stench while he was guarding the body.
Pope John XXIII followed the reign of Pope Pius XII. After his death, John was treated with a simple formalin solution and placed in an airtight, layered coffin. It worked remarkably well — though the Church wouldn’t find that out until decades later.
But the Vatican has bigger problems than the bodies of popes. Across the world, the hands, heads and feet of saints are venerated — an extension of the idea of the Incarnation. Just as God became man in Jesus, so the holiness of his greatest followers adheres in the matter which made up their bodies. All these relics face the dangers of decomposition.
In 1975, Monsignor Gianfranco Nolli, director of the Vatican’s Egyptian Museum, had an inspiration. After examining the excellent state of 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummies, he believed the Church could advance its treatments of popes and saints for the same effect.
The Vatican put together a team of researchers, which worked to update and improve the mummification process. Medical surgeons, pathologists, radiologists, anthropologists and microbiologists came up with a conservation treatment and began treating the newly deceased and bodies and body parts dating back as far as the 3rd century.
Savior of Saints
The team was called by many congregations to treat bodies of saints that had not previously been embalmed at the time of death and were later found in a state of decay.
Such was the case with the body of St. Clare of Assisi, who died in the 13th century and was found by the nuns working there in 1987 in a casket full of moths.
Clare, one of the first followers of Saint Francis of Assisi, founded the Order of Poor Ladies, nuns who tended to the impoverished; today they are known as the Poor Clares.
She had been treated with primitive methods when she died in 1253, with some herbs inserted into her muscles and wrapped in cotton. The cotton proved to be damaging, leaving the casket damp and inviting insects. For that reason, most holy people are now wrapped in linen.
The conservation team bathed the saint’s bone fragments in a series of solutions for months at a time to render her immune to parasites.
The team also was called to treat the foot of St. Teresa of Avila, a nun famous for her visions of Jesus and her devotion to the poor in Spain. Her followers were called “discalced,” or shoeless, for their habit of wearing simple sandals, not shoes.
St. Teresa, who died in 1582, is an example of how obsessed earlier Catholics were with relics of the flesh. After her death, a priest cut off her left hand, from which he took a finger, wearing it around his neck for the rest of his life.
Followers later removed her heart, right arm, right foot and a piece of jaw to display as relics in various sites.
Much of her ended up in Rome. But in 1984, the church she was displayed in was robbed; the glass case containing her relics was shattered and her foot was stolen. It was returned days later wrapped in a communist newspaper.
The embalming team chemically treated the foot and placed it back in the reliquary, perhaps giving St. Teresa a bit of peace.
In sacristies and other back rooms of churches, the team was sometimes given a pile of bones that they had to reconstruct before the sterilization process began. The scientific process was of course not without a bit of bureaucracy. In front of the body upon the opening of each casket they had to swear and sign an affidavit in the presence of the local bishop and a lawyer that they would not ruin or destroy the sacred body.
Even so, the process was sometimes remarkably casual. At times, team members stored relics in their own homes. One doctor assigned to treat the body of St. Fernando III, King of Spain, who died in 1252, transported his sacred vestments to Rome and brought them to the local dry cleaner.
That said, an embalmer who worked on the project says it truly was God’s work. She says sometimes the deceased helped them in their work, sending them messages.
Her most memorable job was embalming St. Don Luigi Orione, an Italian priest known for his work with the poor and orphans. She tried to change his shoes as she prepared his body for burial — but every time she left the body alone, the new shoes mysteriously had been removed and replaced with his old poor man’s shoes.
Preserving a Pope
The team’s most important task was Pope John XXIII. The pope, popular for his jovial nature, was considered pivotal because of his convening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, which modernized the Mass, bringing in contemporary music and local languages instead of Latin.
After his death, he was credited for curing an Italian nun, who prayed to him when she developed a stomach tumor. Her healing, with no medical explanation, was his first miracle.
In 2000, Pope John Paul II had him exhumed to be declared “blessed,” part of the progression to sainthood. The airtight coffin had left him virtually undisturbed, and the embalming team wanted to keep it that way.
After the pope’s internal organs were removed and analyzed, the body was placed in a stainless-steel tub for several weeks in a solution of formalin and alcohol, then neutralized for several weeks.
His body then undertook a series of baths in assorted solutions for months at a time, including various mixtures of ethanol, methanol, phenol, camphor, nitrobenzene, turpentine and benzoic acid.
Finally the body was bandaged in linen cloths saturated with a solution of mercury bichloride and ethanol. Then a second team ensconced him with wax on his face and hands. The entire process took about a year.
The Church decided not to rebury Pope John XXIII, instead putting him on display for pilgrims. More than 25,000 people visit St. Peter’s Basilica every day, and many faithful still believe the incorrupt state of his body is a miracle.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a legal body inside the Vatican that analyzes witness accounts and oversees the legal measures required for sainthood, failed to recognize the pope’s bodily condition as a miracle — perhaps because the airtight container does not count as an act of God.
But Pope Francis waived the second miracle requirement, believing that John’s good works were reason enough.
Continued at link