Catholic relics and papal remains
When Vatican officials announced recently that Pope Benedict XVI's
2005 election rendered his organ donor card null and void, they offered
no specific reason for the change. The curious history of papal body
parts, however, offers some clues. "A decision of a personal character
made when [Benedict] was a private citizen is no longer operative now
that he is the head of the Catholic Church," said the Vatican's chief
spokesman, Federico Lombardi. He also called the idea of transplanting
the organs of a man who is almost 84 "a little surreal."
Lombardi
dismissed reports that the church preserves a dead pope's body in order
to supply holy relics in case he's declared a saint. But Archbishop
Zygmunt Zimowski, head of the Vatican's health care office, told an
Italian newspaper that one reason to keep papal remains intact would be
for "possible future veneration."
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Since Benedict's five
predecessors are under formal consideration for sainthood, it's not a
huge stretch to see Benedict as a possible saint-in-waiting. And where
there's a saint, there are often bodily relics to be venerated by the
faithful. Generally speaking—at least in modern times—the church prefers
that the relics all be in one place.
Pope John Paul II, who will
be beatified on May 1, is drawing as much attention in death as he did
in life. A vial of his blood, taken during a medical examination in his
last days, will be placed in the altar of a church near Krakow, Poland,
later this year.
John Paul's tomb in the grottoes under St.
Peter's Basilica boosted pilgrim traffic from just a few hundred to as
many as 18,000 per day. To accommodate the even bigger crowds
anticipated once John Paul is beatified, the Vatican is moving his body
to a more accessible chapel upstairs in the basilica itself.
The
body of Pope John XXIII, who died in 1963 and, like John Paul, is one
step away from sainthood, was placed in a glass coffin and moved
upstairs in 2001; his intact embalmed body was found to be "incorrupt,"
or free from decay.
The burial place of the martyred St. Peter,
traditionally considered the first pope, determined the site of the
basilica that bears his name. In 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that the
bones of a man found buried under the basilica were in fact Peter's.
The
most perverse tribute to the importance of papal remains came in the
ninth century, when a successor of Pope Formosus (891-896) exhumed his
nine-months-dead body and put it on trial for perjury and other crimes.
As Notre Dame scholar Richard P. McBrien recounts in Lives of the Popes,
Formosus's cadaver was "propped up on a throne in full pontifical
vestments" for the trial, and after his conviction "three fingers of his
right hand (by which he swore oaths and gave blessings) were cut off."
His body was thrown into the Tiber River but recovered by a hermit and
eventually reburied with honors by a later pope.
