The Relics · The Sign of Incorruption
The Incorruptibles
Bodies God did not let the earth take.
There are bodies in cathedrals across Europe and the Americas that have refused to do what bodies do. Sometimes for a hundred years. Sometimes for five hundred. They have not been embalmed. They have not been refrigerated. They have been buried in damp earth, exhumed, examined by surgeons and scientists, and found whole. The Church calls them the Incorruptibles. The site holds with the tradition: incorruption is a real sign, given by God, that the saint’s presence has not departed from the matter that bore them.
The reader who has been raised on the materialist account of the body will read “refused to do what bodies do” as overheated language. The editors are direct: the phenomenon is empirically observable. The bodies have been exhumed under independent witness. The medical literature exists. The Church has investigated, and continues to investigate, with the rigour that canonization processes demand. The reader who wishes to verify the claim has only to travel to the relic.
The principle
“The bodies of the saints are temples of the Holy Spirit. They are not dead matter to be discarded; they are the continuing presence of the saint among the faithful, the visible proof that the resurrection is not a metaphor.”Site paraphrase of the standing Catholic theology of relic veneration, drawing on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae III q. 25 a. 6 and the Second Council of Nicaea (787)
“Therefore was the body of Elisha cast in: and the man went, and touched the bones of Elisha; and presently he came to life, and stood upon his feet.”2 Kings 13:21 (Douay-Rheims) — the Old Testament foundation for bodily relic veneration
The bodies, named
The list below is not exhaustive. It is the small selection the editors find most theologically and historically significant. Each can be visited; each has been independently witnessed.
St Bernadette Soubirous (1844–1879) lies in the chapel of the Convent of Saint-Gildard in Nevers, France, in a glass-sided reliquary at eye level with the visitor. She was exhumed three times — in 1909, 1919, and 1925 — and each time was found substantially intact. The 1925 examination, by Doctor Talon and Doctor Comte, is documented in detail. The thin wax mask over her face (added in 1925) covers minor darkening; the body beneath is undecayed. She has lain visible since 1925 in a habit, hands folded, rosary in her grip.
St Catherine of Bologna (1413–1463) sits upright in a glass case in the Church of the Body of Christ (Corpus Domini) in Bologna, where she has sat for over 560 years. She was a Poor Clare abbess; her body was exhumed eighteen days after burial because of reported fragrance from the grave, and was placed in the chair where it has remained ever since. The skin has darkened, but the body is intact. The case is open during certain feast days for direct veneration.
St Padre Pio of Pietrelcina (1887–1968), Capuchin friar and stigmatist, was exhumed in 2008 forty years after his death. His body was found to be substantially preserved. Since 2013 he has been displayed in a wax-overlaid form at the Sanctuary of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina in San Giovanni Rotondo; the body beneath the wax is real and intact. He is the most visited relic in the world by current pilgrimage numbers, drawing roughly seven million pilgrims a year.
St Catherine Labouré (1806–1876), the visionary of the Miraculous Medal, was exhumed in 1933, fifty-seven years after burial. Her body was undecayed; her eyes (sky-blue) were preserved intact, which the medical literature regards as nearly impossible. She lies in the chapel at 140 Rue du Bac in Paris, where the Miraculous Medal was originally revealed to her.
St Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) lies in the chapel of the Mother House of the Vincentians on the Rue de Sèvres in Paris. His body, after several centuries, was found with the skeleton intact and some flesh preserved; the body was given a wax overlay for veneration, and his actual heart is preserved separately as a relic at the Daughters of Charity Mother House in Paris.
St Pope John XXIII (1881–1963) was exhumed in 2001, thirty-eight years after his death. His body was found substantially intact, and he has been on display in St Peter’s Basilica beneath the altar of St Jerome since then. Vatican statements have noted the unusual preservation without making a formal supernatural claim.
St John Vianney (1786–1859), the Curé d’Ars and patron of parish priests, is on display at the Basilica of Ars-sur-Formans. His face beneath the wax is the original, preserved. He is sometimes called the “Smiling Saint” for the expression visible through the case.
The editors’ position
The site holds, with the Catholic tradition, that incorruption is a real and supernatural sign. It is not produced by embalming. It is not produced by climate. It is not produced by chance. Where bodies have been buried in conditions that should have produced ordinary decomposition, and have not produced it, the older tradition recognised the work of God preserving the saint’s body as a continuing presence among the faithful. The editors agree.
The standing folk-Catholic intuition — that the more extraordinary the sign, the more clearly God’s hand is upon the matter — is correct. The incorrupt body is not a higher-grade relic in the technical taxonomy (it remains first-class, the same as any bone fragment), but in the older lived tradition the incorrupt body draws veneration of a different intensity, because the sign is present and visible to the eye. The reader who has stood before St Bernadette in Nevers, or before Catherine Labouré in Paris, or before Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo, knows the difference between reading about these bodies and being in their presence. The site teaches the reader to honour that difference.
Visiting
The Incorruptibles are not behind glass to be admired as museum pieces. They are venerated. Pilgrimage to them is a real spiritual act and produces real effects. The reader who can travel to one of them should. The reader who cannot can still venerate them at a distance, by the prayer and the inward gesture of consent that the older tradition has always taught.
The standing devotion of the editorial office to the Incorruptibles takes this form: a brief prayer at the start of each working day naming the saints whose bodies have been preserved, and an annual feast (the editors observe November 1st, All Saints, as the day on which the entire company of the Incorruptibles is honoured by name in the office).