[Tax-chick]

I still think digging up the grave was tacky.

[Clint Williams]

Why is it necessary to move his remains? I do not understand. Is he less holy because his remains are where they are, instead of being someplace else?

To Roman Catholics: Am I wrong for thinking that as soon as I pass on what happens to my body after my departure is irrelevant to my soul? Do saints' remains acquire some special magic, maybe sometime after their death? (I don't see this in the Bible, though I remain puzzled by the Turin shroud -- which among many things tells me indirectly that I do not have all the answers.)

[AnAmericanMother]

Well, I guess it doesn't worry me much because I took a lot of archaeology courses in school. Except in extraordinary circumstances, there's not much left after a hundred years or so. In acid soil, as in much of northern England and Scandinavia, you have to carefully peel off paper-thin layers of soil in burial mounds to detect the "corpse shadows" - a slight difference in soil color caused by the decomposition of the bones. It looks more like an X-ray than anything else.

And I was fascinated as a child by the preserved corpse of one Mr. Hogenboom, who died in the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic in the 1790s and was buried in a corner of the graveyard that was saturated with limestone water . . . so he was saponified, i.e. turned to soap. They have taken him off exhibit in a fit of political correctness since I was a kid, though.

But if you don't get dug up, eventually you get excavated by a bulldozer or paved over for a subdivision . . . .

For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God. Whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom.