Posted on 04/07/2019 4:09:54 AM PDT by buffyt
Edited on 04/07/2019 8:57:31 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
Of that, there is no doubt.
Well, the AP said it’s “worshipped”, so it must be true.
LOL!
I wonder what happens when a delicate freeper tours a Gothic cathedral in Paris or Rome or, worse, Bologna? Does he run from the cathedral screaming “blasphemy!” taking refuge in the nearest McDonald’s?
It boils down to a belief in the goodness of the body and the resurrection of the dead.
In general, the body is honoured by being kept together and not by being discarded as something with which we are done. Placing it to rest to await the resurrection is appropriate. There is recognition that most bodies of the dead will in the end need to be reconstituted, but that of itself is not the way it was meant to be.
If a particular person who has gone on to their heavenly reward is very active in the consciousness of the Church, it may be appropriate to honour them and recognize the eventual glorification of their body by spreading their body, even in its unglorified state, around, provided that it continues to be honoured. I wouldn’t want to have the bodies of my great-grandparents with me, even though I honour them in a way.
On the other hand, sitting about three feet away from me at this moment are small bone fragments from St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and St. Monica in one small reliquary, and fragments from St. Philip Neri, St. Lawerence of Brindisi, and St. Jerome (Hieronymus in Latin) in a second. They are important spiritual patrons for me, intercessors, and friends. I believe on the last day the fragments will end up in their proper places and be glorified. In the mean time, these six saints in heaven think of me much more and more effectively than I think of them—though I do think of them, and strive to imitate Christ as they imitated Christ.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Saints, Aquinas and Augustine are the greatest theologians in the Church, Monica was Augustine’s mother and a huge spiritual warrior, Lawrence B and Jerome are the two doctors of the Church who are the greatest specialists in Scripture, and Philip Neri is another huge spiritual warrior, who in various ways is tied into St. Jerome. Given my own profession and my own personal life, these are awesome examples for me on how to imitate Christ.
I’ve landed half a dozen funerals in the church. No one ever asked about the body.
His heart is being venerated, not worshiped.
“I’ve been searching for a heart of gold...
And it’s getting old”
Saint John Vianney, pray for us!
Can you explain this passage to me? “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.” Acts 19:11-12.
In-deed:
The Order of the Good Death The (Not Really So Very) Incorrupt Corpses
[some] incorruptibles get treatments (like a corpse spa) and it’s no big secret.
According to Church doctrine, incorruptibility alone can’t be counted as a miracle anymore. More sophisticated scientific explanations as well as mistakes found in hundreds of years of preservation records have forced the Church to reconsider which saints deserved the title in the first place....
small differences in temperature, moisture, and construction techniques lead to some tombs producing naturally preserved bodies while others in the same church didn’t....
Once the incorrupt bodies were removed from these climates or if the climates changed, they deteriorated. This may have been what happened to St. Francesca Romana who was deemed incorrupt four months after her death in 1440 only to be found fully skeletonized in 1698 (though you still hear people refer to her as incorrupt)...
The use of wax as an artist’s medium invites even more confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to the incorrupt. There are thousands of wax effigies in Catholic churches. Some have relics inside them, others don’t, and maybe a few hundred are fully incorrupt corpses wearing wax masks.
At the turn of the 21st century, the Vatican commissioned a team of pathologists and chemists to study saints’ bodies. The team encountered many cases in which saints had clearly been mummified, often by their followers, in an attempt to preserve (or help preserve) their bodies. One of these cases was Saint Margaret of Cortona. - https://psmag.com/environment/incorruptible-bodies-saints-religion-catholicism-pope-john-paul-94892<
The Incorruptibles The bodies of many medieval Catholic saints and martyrs have resisted decay for centuries— just the sort of mystery that begs for scientific inquiry By Heather Pringle -
Those who preserved Saint Margaret had done so remarkably thoroughly, excising her internal organs and drenching her skin in fragrant lotions. Their handiwork reminded Fulcheri of the techniques employed by ancient Egyptian embalmers. Mulling this over, the pathologist wondered whether the resemblances were merely coincidental or whether at some point in the distant past,...
In 1697, for example, an Italian surgeon left a list of 27 powdered herbs and drugs that he had employed to preserve the body of Saint Gregorio Barbarigo. ...
The church records offered no explanation for such drastic actions, so Fulcheri began hunting elsewhere for clues, searching to see if he could find other similarly mummified saints in Italy. His research has turned up five other similar cases— Saint Clare of Montefalco, Blessed Margaret of Metola, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Bernardine of Siena, and Saint Rita of Cascia...
By the time holy figures were exhumed during beatification or canonization trials, the tombs' microclimate had sometimes desiccated their flesh, turning it to the texture of old leather. And if there was any confusion among officials about which body was the correct one, they picked the best preserved, for incorruptibility was taken as a sign of holiness. Is it true that the bodies of some saints are incorruptible? /p>
I read _Scent_ by Annick LeGuerer some years ago and it had a section on the scent of sanctity. It discussed the presence of acetone in the blood as responsible for that agreeable floral odor described as "sanctified." Acetone in the blood is a result of diabetes. The diabetic body makes it in abnormal mass quantities. (This finding is what led to the Church saying that the incorruptible body could no longer be the only test of sanctity.) The book said St. Teresa of Avila was a confirmed diabetic (but I haven't read that info anywhere else). The book also went into how the mind (in ecstatic state) could change the blood alcohol composition so that was another way for saints to have the scent of sanctity. It was really interesting to think that our incorruptibles/saints were diabetics. - Miss P
Vatican’s secret, and deadly, project to mummify saints
Paramahansa Yogananda As reported in Time Magazine on 4 August 1952, Harry T. Rowe, Los Angeles Mortuary Director of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, where Yogananda's body was received, embalmed and interred,[46] wrote in a notarized letter[7] The absence of any visual signs of decay in the dead body of Paramahansa Yogananda offers the most extraordinary case in our experience... No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death... No indication of mold was visible on his skin, and no visible drying up took place in the bodily tissues. This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one... No odor of decay emanated from his body at any time...[47][48]
[Buddhist] Monk's Body Miraculously Intact 80 Years After Death
My father in law insisted that cremation was pagan and that if you were cremated your soul would not go to heaven.
So, I thought about it... and one day I asked him “if you were in a war and you got hit by a bomb or an artillery shell and you were blasted into tiny little pieces and burned in the searing hot temperatures of that bomb are you telling me that you wouldn’t go to heaven because you weren’t properly buried?” & “What about Sailors that are buried at Sea and whose remains are devoured by crabs and other scavengers of the sea and ultimately shat out?” And, “if we are prepared for burial in such a way as to cause the body to not decay naturally and in a false state of a state of preservation, would not that go against returning our bodies to dust or back to Earth and not allow the worm to do its job?” He had no answer but he stuck to his guns.
I have no idea where he came up with that.
As the Saints Go are not all believers all considered Saints? Or is the definition different for some denominations?
I comtemplate the worship (honoring) of saints, especially when I hear certain people talk about the writings of Paul. I think I have seen churches cross the line on Paul where he is venerated to the point where we are listening to what Paul says, we are reading what Paul wrote, we are thinking about how Paul put it down but, we don’t give the same thought to Jesus.
I look at some new charismatic denominations and it’s all about Paul there’s some Jesus filling in there but the bulk of the sermons, just as the bulk of the New Testament canonized is 70% Paul. There’s a lot of John in there too.
I try to stick really close to the red letter and I also look at what Christ used for examples in his talking with his disciples and the talking to those he interacted with everyday. And He used a lot of examples from the Old Testament yet, there are some denominations that say we are under a New Covenant in which completely dismisses the Old Testament.
There are some things in the Old Testament that are no longer valid? Did God lie to us the first time around? I don’t know, so I stick to a personal relationship and try my hardest to avoid dogmatic prattle.
Well, there is the matter of gargoyles. As you were told before, your own Bernard of Clairvaux spoke out against such: versions:
What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters before the eyes of the brothers as they read? What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these strange savage lions, and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man, or these spotted tigers? I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body. Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat... Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities, we should at least regret what we have spent on them. ("Apologia ad Guillelmum abbatem.")
Rather than being compelled to defend the errors of Rome, true Christians defend what the only wholly inspired record of what the NT church believed, and in which Catholic distinctive are not what is manifest .
In other words, they run screaming from the cathedrals to the nearest Mickey D’s. There’s a good one on the Champs Elysee, btw.
There are natural explanations for mummification, and there are artificial ways of attempting it. Before proclaiming something a miracle, it is a good idea to look for natural factors. The Church actually has always had people who can rub two active brain cells together, though many of those lacking this attribute now days do seem to end up in Rome. Some of these do seem to be influential in the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, but I’d worry more about their idea of what passes for Heroic Sanctity (imitating Christ and conforming to Him in an outstanding way that is worth thinking about) than past or present evaluations of incorruptibility.
For a good hard core example of miraculous incorruptibility, I’d suggest looking to St. Francis Xavier, who was interred with quicklime for the sake of getting everything that was not bone to go away quickly.
For what it is worth, from Trent to Paul VI, to be canonized, one had to be able to show heroic virtue in the person and four supernatural death or post-death things (Martyrdom could count for one, it is possible that being incorrupt would count for a second in certain cases, but I doubt that it was automatic).
“Saint” Paul VI reduced the number of four to two—if it hadn’t been for this inflation, he would presently, at most, be “Blessed” Paul VI.
“Thou shalt venerate saints and their body parts” said no verse in the Bible.
On my way to Mass, checked my FR. Saw this post and thought “ oh boy the anti-Catholic Freepers will have a hay-day with this.” You didn’t disappoint. Ya’ll have almost as many vile things to say about my peeps and me as you do about the Religion of Peace . Not sure where it comes from. BTW I think the present Pope is an evil commie but I will never turn my back on my Church.
Old World religion whose adherents were illiterates for centuries.
Protestants arose with the printing press.
Uh no.
Jesus said do not worship Him.
Interesting comment about fragrance as a sign of sanctity. I smelled roses many times in the late nineties, especially on the day of Mother Teresa’s death, and occasionally on receiving Holy Communion. Always happened in church or at prayer, but no corpses around on any of those occasions.
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