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Rest in peace. That is what we are supposed to do when we finally shed this mortal coil. But not necessarily if you are a saint.
Saints are constantly being prayed to for assistance for all sorts of problems and situations. Some of them are sometimes exposed to the public gaze, and some of them even get to be paraded around towns now and again. Yet others, if their bodies remain incorrupt as saints bodies are supposed to, even get to have a medical exam.
Take Saint Rose of Viterbo, the 13th century virgin who at the age of just three raised her aunt from the dead before going on for a short reclusive life of holiness and penance. The saint, who lies in the monastery of Viterbo near Rome and is paraded around the town each year, has recently been X-rayed to discover whether or not she died of tuberculosis as originally thought.
Researchers found, however, that the saint, whose feast day is 4 September, was most likely killed by a blood clot in the heart; Cantrell’s syndrome, causing defects in the heart and surrounding tissues. You’d have thought that this would have been the end of the matter, but researchers say that at some point in the future they might be able to analyse her heart with ‘more modern technologies’.
Requiescat in pace is what I say.
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Rest in peace. That is what we are supposed to do when we finally shed this mortal coil. But not necessarily if you are a saint.
Saints are constantly being prayed to for assistance for all sorts of problems and situations. Some of them are sometimes exposed to the public gaze, and some of them even get to be paraded around towns now and again. Yet others, if their bodies remain incorrupt as saints bodies are supposed to, even get to have a medical exam.
Take Saint Rose of Viterbo, the 13th century virgin who at the age of just three raised her aunt from the dead before going on for a short reclusive life of holiness and penance. The saint, who lies in the monastery of Viterbo near Rome and is paraded around the town each year, has recently been X-rayed to discover whether or not she died of tuberculosis as originally thought.
Researchers found, however, that the saint, whose feast day is 4 September, was most likely killed by a blood clot in the heart; Cantrell’s syndrome, causing defects in the heart and surrounding tissues. You’d have thought that this would have been the end of the matter, but researchers say that at some point in the future they might be able to analyse her heart with ‘more modern technologies’.
Requiescat in pace is what I say.
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