Catholic Church strives to keep cadavers intact
Pontiff can't be organ donor
Catholic Church strives to keep cadavers intact
By Francis X. Rocca
RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
VATICAN CITY - When Vatican officials announced recently that Pope Benedict XVI's 2005 election
rendered his organ-donor card null and void, they offered no 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 top spokesman, the
Rev. Federico Lombardi.
Lombardi also called the idea of transplanting the organs of a man who is already 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."
Because Benedict's five predecessors are now under formal consideration for sainthood, it's not
a huge stretch to see Benedict - still alive and kicking - 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 May 1, is drawing as much attention in death as he did
in life. A vial of his blood, taken during a medical examination during his last days, will be
placed in the altar of a church near Krakow, Poland, this year.
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 St. Peter's Basilica 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.
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' 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.
Papal funeral traditions have required special arrangements for the disposition of their bodies.
Because of a customary nine-day mourning period before burial, the hearts and other fast-decaying
internal organs of almost all the popes from Sixtus V (1585-1590) to Leo XIII (1878-1903) were
removed before embalming.
The hearts were placed in Rome's Church of Sts. Vincent and Anastasius, where they remain today.
The rest of those popes - their bodies, that is - are scattered across various churches in
Rome.
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