Popes: Pickled, Preserved, and Putrefying.

the image today is the catafalque for the funeral of Pius XII

There is a lot of excitement about the upcoming beatification of John Paul II including speculation about whether, when the body is disinterred, will it be “perfectly preserved.”  There are plans that his coffin will be on display for a period of time in Saint Peter’s Basilica, but some are hoping that the remains will be intact and the body of the pope will be put on display.  When the body of John XXIII was disinterred in 2001 it was found to be in remarkably good shape, but the Vatican has said that there is nothing miraculous about this as the body had been properly embalmed before its burial in 1963.  When one visits Saint Peter’s Basilica today one can see the remains of John XXIII in a glass coffin beneath the altar of “The Last Communion of Saint Jerome” on the eastern side of the basilica’s north transept.  John does look pretty good for someone who has been dead almost fifty years.  On the other hand what you actually see is a finely crafted wax mask and “gloves” covering the actual face and hands of the deceased pope.  There apparently was some discoloration of the skin over a period of time which is not abnormal in embalmed bodies.    

There are several other deceased popes and prelates on view beneath the various altars of the basilica, most notably Pope St. Pius X (pope from 1903-1914), Pope Bl. Innocent XI (pope from 1676-1689) and Saint Josaphat, Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Polotsk (martyred 1623).  Their bodies are all on display, but faces and hands—the only visible parts—are concealed by silver masks and gloves.  I do remember my first several trips to Rome before the time when Josaphat’s face and hands were covered and I would describe the remains more as “mummified” than as “preserved” if, what one means by “preserved” is appearing as natural as at the time of death.  Perhaps I will do some entries in the future about various saintly remains in Rome and elsewhere that are deemed to be “incorrupt.” 

But all this brings up the topic about preserving papal bodies.  When John Paul I died, somewhat unexpectedly, the lack of an autopsy was explained by the “fact” that papal bodies are never autopsied.   But this is not true—autopsies were performed on a number of popes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Furthermore, it was a common practice as part of the embalming practice of the time to remove the entrails and internal organs of the popes and place them in canopic jars which were then inhumed in the Church of Saints Anastasio e Vincente facing the Trevi Fountain.  Twenty-two of the popes between  Sixtus V (d. 1590) and Gregory XVI (died 1846).  (I have heard as many as 25 popes and as late as Leo XIII (d. 1903) but the information varies from source to source and I have chosen the most conservative statistics.  I hope that when I am in Rome again next month I might be able to check for myself the plaque to the left of the altar that records the information).    This Church was chosen as the depository for the remains because of its proximity to the Quirinale Palace which was the usual residence of the Popes from the end of the sixteenth century until the fall of Papal Rome in 1870.  The Church was long referred to as the parrochia  pontificale —the papal parish.

There has been no consistency on the issue of embalming papal bodies.  John Paul II supposedly was not embalmed but “prepared.”  It seems that what the Vatican meant by “prepared” was sufficient embalming to prevent an embarrassing incident during the laying in state.  News reports at the time said the pope was not arterially embalmed (which would have involved replacing the blood in the arterial system with a preservative fluid) as was John XXIII, but that at least visible parts of the body—hands, head, and neck were injected with sufficient preservatives to keep the body presentable until burial.  Orifices (mouth, ears, nose) would have been sealed to prevent leakage of internal fluids while the body was on display.   This sort of embalming would not prevent or even significantly delay decomposition.  I saw the John Paul’s body twice—once as it was carried into the Basilica for the laying-in-state and once (the day before the funeral) while it lie-in-state before the central altar.  He didn’t look great—I must admit—but most dead bodies don’t unless under special lighting and the Vatican makes no attempt for its deceased to “look like he’s just  sleeping.”   I don’t recall how John Paul I’s body held up or what preparation had been done to it, though I seem to recall that like his successor the body had been “prepared” rather than embalmed.  Paul VI likewise had been only lightly embalmed; he had died August—the hottest and most humid month in Rome and thus not a good time for dead bodies awaiting burial.  By the time came to put him in his coffin and close it most sources agreed burial had been delayed a little too long.  

One of the reasons that John XXIII probably had been thoroughly embalmed is the disaster over the preparation of the body of his predecessor, Pius XII. You know, this whole thing is getting a little macabre and it’s about to get even more ghoulish, much more.  Pius’ physician, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, a man of questionable skill and no discretion, organized the embalming according to a new method devised by Professor Oreste Nuzzi from Naples.  A papal funeral is not the time to experiment, but Galeazzi-Lisi and Nuzzi put the pope’s body in a plastic bag filled with herbs, spices, and resins “that,”they claimed,  were “the same with which the body of Jesus Christ was preserved.”  Well, Jesus wasn’t dead that long, and what happened to Pius wasn’t pretty.  Pius died in October and the summer of 1958 was a lingering one.  The heat at Castle Gondolfo was oppressive and enclosing the body in an airtight bag actually accelerated the decomposition.  After the body had been “treated” it was dressed in pontifical robes and put in a coffin for the journey into Rome and the funeral at St. Peter’s Basilica.  During a ceremonial stop at the Pope’s cathedral, St. John Lateran, a rumbling noise and “bang” was heard from within the coffin—Pius’s chest cavity had exploded from built up gasses.  Galeazzi-Lisi and Nuzzi had to treat the body two more times but body parts began to detach and the skin turned green and then black—all this within four days of his death.  Several Swiss guards standing watch at the catafalque fainted from the stench and the body had to be recoffined and interred on October 13, 1958—seven days before the scheduled funeral.  At the official funeral on October 20^th, an elaborate three tiered catafalque surmounted by the papal tiara replaced the body.   Part of the fault for this debacle goes to Pius himself as he had not wanted the internal organs and workings of the body altered in any way and an essential part of embalming is to release the gasses that build up in the chest and stomach cavities.         

Popes had been routinely embalmed—as had various other world leaders such as Queen Victoria when funerals were to be public and there was to be some delay before burial.  Pius X, a man who always—even when Patriarch of Venice and then as Pope—had cherished the simple customs of his peasant background left instructions that he was not to be embalmed—which makes his reported incorrupt status somewhat remarkable.  Of course embalming techniques before the latter part of the nineteenth century were not only primitive but verged on the barbaric.  Papal bodies—unlike British Royalty and current American practice for public funerals—were traditionally displayed for burial not so much for religious reasons as to demonstrate that the body of the deceased did not show poison, strangulation or other obvious violence. 

Benedict XV died at 6:00 a.m. on January 22, 1922.  The un-embalmed body (the New York Times, January 24^th 1922 says that this was “contrary to the usual practice”) was taken on the 23^rd to the Basilica of Saint Peter’s where it lie in state behind the closed grille of the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament from eleven in the morning until that evening when it was removed to the crypt and interred on the afternoon of January 24^th—just over 48 hours after his death.  Pius XI died seventeen years later on February 10, 1939.  The following day his body was brought to the Vatican Basilica where it lay for four days until its internment.  I have not been a able to find any information as to whether or not he had been embalmed but the delay of five days between death and burial suggests he may have been.

Well, enough of this morose subject.  Perhaps we will revisit some idiosyncrasies of papal  interments at another time, but I knew this one would be an attention grabber.    

Is Vatican II in Danger: VIII "the new translation."

There is one final entry I want to post on the subject of the liturgical developments of the past several years and the question of whether or not the Second Vatican Council is slowly being undone.  And perhaps not all that slowly!  Then I hope to return to some entries on the History of the Church in America, particularly several blogs on the development of anti-Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But before we look at anti-Catholicism with the rise of the Klan and some dirty American politics, let’s deal with one more entry on the subject of the new translation of the Roman Missal that will come into effect this autumn. 

I have seen large sections of the new Missal and I honestly think several aspects of it are an improvement over the current translations.  I also think for various reasons that much of it is a step backward.   Several weeks ago I was doing a workshop at a monastery of Episcopalian nuns and was present for the Service of Holy Communion according to the current Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church in the United States.  Last Sunday, visiting friends out of town I attended their Lutheran Church for the Sunday Eucharist according to the Lutheran Book of Worship.  Both Sundays I had no problem reciting much of the liturgy from memory as the translations used in their various rites are the ICEL translations, or at least close enough to our current translation that there is no barrier to ecumenical participation.  This feature will be lost or greatly reduced as we unilaterally introduce a new translation.  It is a step backward ecumenically. In many ways this is a small issue as most of the prayers affected—e.g. the particular Eucharistic Prayers (canons), prefaces, prayers at the Presentation of the Gifts, and the invitation to Communion are unique to the Roman Rite, but the changes in the Creed, Gloria, and Sanctus give witness to an unnecessary division—not of the substance of our common faith but of an arbitrary expression of that substance. 

The second objection is that this new “translation” is not always as faithful a translation as it toots itself to be and can, in several instances, lead to false doctrine (aka heresy).  The two most serious examples are the Words of Institution and the response to the presider’s greeting. 

In the Words of Institution for the Cup, the Latin phrase “pro multis” is translated “for many.”  Now anyone who has two years of high school Latin would ask: what is the problem with that?  Well there are two problems.  The first is the translation itself; the second is the doctrine expressed.  While “for many” would normally be a good translation of the phrase pro multis  in this case it is a distortion.  The Latin itself is a translation of the Greek in which the New Testament is written and from which these words find their role in the consecration of the wine.  Today few priests know Latin anymore (which doesn’t stop some of them from “saying mass” in it) and virtually none know Greek.  But the Latin pro multis is itself a translation of the Greek ‘oi polloi which means “the many” or “the multitude.”  These terms are inclusive; they affirm the doctrine that Christ’s blood was shed for the multitude of humanity, for all.  If it can be restricted in any way, it would mean that Christ’s blood was shed for the common sort of people, the “great unwashed” as it were.  ‘oi polloi has a sense vulgar or low class sort of people.  The problem is that Latin doesn’t have the word “the” (nor “a”) and thus “for the many” becomes in literal Latin, pro multis “for many.”  I have already mentioned the second objection that this translation produces, the doctrinal danger, of people coming to believe that Christ died for some, not for all.  This Jansenist proposition—that Christ did not die for all—was condemned by Innocent X in the Bull cum occasione in 1653.  It is Catholic doctrine that Christ died for all.  It is no coincidence that the agitation against the current translation has been in great part from Catholic sources in the United States and in Great Britain that have expressed other Jansenist tendencies. With the principle lex orandi; lex credendi  (literally “the law of prayer is the law of doctrine” meaning that the formulae by which we pray shapes the formulae by which we express our faith) we run the risk of Catholics coming to believe that Christ died for many but not for all—that are those for whom Christ did not die—and thus falling into the condemned doctrine of the Jansenists. 

The second problem with the translation is the translation of the response “et cum spiritu tuo” –“and with your spirit.”  I will grant that the translation is faithful on a literal level, but it misses accuracy because it does not take into account the shift of anthropology between the ancient Roman world and our world today.  A more accurate translation, awkward as it may be, can be rendered Dominus vobiscum: The (peace of the) Lord dwell within you.  Though “the Lord dwell within you” by itself is by no means bad, there is the implication of something even deeper, richer.  The same meaning might be conveyed as “the grace of the Lord” or some similar such phrase that implies an indwelling of God by grace.”  Similarly, taking into account the original understanding of the human person from the second- or third-century classical world, the response “et cum spiritu tuo” would better be rendered “and (his peace, or indwelling) within your deepest heart.   The problem is that the translation “and with your spirit” while literal, to the modern mind presents a two tiered world of a material or physical self and a higher “spiritual” self while the classical understanding saw spirit not so much as “soul” in the sense of the immortal or heavenly component of the human person, but as their truest and most authentic, most real, part.  This spiritus dwells within the person, where we would say today—metaphorically of course—in their heart.  It is dangerous to create a two-tiered world of “spiritual” and “earthly” realities as it leads quite quickly to a certain Gnosticism that disdains all but the “spiritual” and this ultimately leads to a denial of both the Incarnation and the Redemption. 

And this leads to the final problem I see with the new translation—not that others may not see other problems of which I am unaware.  But the entire translation effort was intended to create a two-tiered language separating the language in which we talk to God from a fundamentally different language in which we speak to our neighbor.  We should, of course, speak as well as we can to both God and neighbor but the separation of “God language” from “neighbor language” can lead to huge doctrinal problems regarding the sanctity of the world in which we live and the relationships which we have in this world—again, problems affecting doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption.  I will be the first to say that the current translation needed a lot of work, for style as well as for precision of doctrine but the new translation is highly problematic and reveals a crisis in the modern Church where there is a cultural split that indicates a far more serious doctrinal division beneath.  As a person of faith, I am confident that all works itself out in time; as a historian I think this signals some stormy seas ahead for the Bark of Peter.