VATICAN CITY (RNS) When Vatican officials announced last week 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 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."
Since 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 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 during 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
also 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' 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.
Most pontiffs, of course, have been allowed to rest in peace, under
more or less grand monuments to their honor. The most famous artistic
byproduct of this custom was Michelangelo's great statue of Moses, which
he sculpted for the tomb of his patron Pope Julius II (1503-1513). The
tomb was never finished, but the statue sits today in Rome's Church of
St. Peter in Chains.
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 Ss. 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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