Was This Nun’s Body Miraculously Preserved?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shamus Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to explore today the role of miracles and evangelization.

How big of a deal should we make a miracle? Should have the Catholic talking to non-believers? How do we deal with that?

One reason is because the end of Mark’s Gospel, I mentioned last week that there’s some controversy about the authenticity or the original authorship of the end of Mark’s gospel. But nevertheless, at the end of Mark’s gospel, it says that, “The Lord Jesus, after he’d spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they, the apostles went forth and preached everywhere while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it. Amen.” That’s the end of it, that the apostles’ ministry was from the beginning, accompanied by miraculous signs. That this was one of the ways people could know that what the Apostles said was true. Now, that’s one reason I wanted to talk about it. But the other one is more immediate that there was a news article that I heard about originally when I was in California.

Catholic News Agency, I believe was the ones who originally broke this story saying there was a miracle in Missouri that the body of the Benedictine sisters of, well, the Benedictine Sisters of Mary, queen of the Apostles, their foundress was thought to be incorrupt. In other words, that they’d exhumed her body. Turns out after four years and she didn’t look the way we thought she would look after being in the ground for four years. She looked like she had died much more recently. At least again, the untrained eye. And what made this more remarkable was two things. One, this community is only about an hour away from where I live. And two, it’s a community I’ve actually spent a little bit of time with. I’ve got a couple different connections with the community. So this originally, like I said, broke I believe with Catholic News Agency and then was picked up by their Catholic media, like Black Catholic Messenger. But then also by a local Kansas City media like the Kansas City Star, and then even other Missouri newspapers.

And then it eventually became a national news story. New York Post, Newsweek and even overseas media were covering this story. And so it seemed like, “Okay, this is too important to just totally ignore it’s too close to home.” So I wanted to talk about it for this podcast, but I also wanted to just go and see it for myself. So I came back in town on Monday and then on Wednesday, this is Wednesday of a week before you’re hearing this. I went up with my family to go and see the body for myself. So I came home from that with some questions answered and some questions larger in my mind than they had been before I left. So in terms of questions that were answered, one of the big ones was who this foundress was? Because to be honest with you, I didn’t realize that Sister Cecilia or Mother Cecilia wasn’t the founders herself and turns out that the foundress was instead Sister Mary Wilhelmina of the Most Holy Rosary.

And she has a remarkable, beautiful story. So she is the granddaughter of slaves and born in the US. She from a very young age had vision. So at the age of two, one of her first memories was having a vision of the Virgin Mary. And she tells the story that on April the second, 1934, she made her first Holy Communion. She said it was an unforgettable experience when our Lord asked me if I would be his. She said He seemed to be such a handsome and wonderful man. I agreed immediately. Then he told me to meet him every Sunday at Holy Communion. I said nothing about this conversation to anyone believing that everyone that went Holy Communion heard our Lord talk to them. And so I don’t know, I love that story. There’s something so simple and humble and faithful about someone who just assumes everyone hears Jesus talking to them when they go to communion.

And it also really highlights that there’s one of three possibilities about Sister Wilhelmina. Either she’s authentically a visionary and seemingly a saint, or she was delusional. She thought she was having visions of Mary and Jesus and having these conversations and they were all hallucination. They were all in her head or she was lying about it. And I don’t think anybody goes for the third option, but those are the possibilities. And that’s something to think about as we analyze whether she really is an incorrupt saint. So that’s the first thing I want to throw out there. Well, as you might imagine, when Jesus asks her to be his in this special we are going to be taking a look at. She interprets this, I think rightly as a call to a religious vocation. And so from her young teenage years, she was trying to join religious orders, but she couldn’t because she was too young.

I believe she’s 19 when she orig eventually joins the Oblates, the Oblate Sisters of Providence who were based out of Baltimore. Now they are the oldest permanent community of Black Catholic sisters in the US. This is still, I believe, 1943. There’s still segregation. And so she’s in this strange position where as a Black Catholic, she is discriminated against both by Black Protestants and by white Catholics for different reasons. And it’s hard for her to find a community that will even take her. So she’s with this community as a teacher and in various roles for more than 50 years from the age of 19 until she’s 70. At the age of 70, she’s got this desire to have the Latin mass and to have more tradition than she was experiencing in her community. And so she successfully found a new religious community, the Benedictine Sisters of Mary, queen of the Apostles.

So whatever you do with your life, the fact that she founded this community at 70 tells you there’s still time. So if you’ve heard of the Benedictine Sisters of Mary, queen of the Apostles it’s probably because of things like their chart topping album Advent at Ephesus. They’re famously beautiful singers who sing all sorts of traditional Catholic music. And so they’ve got a variety of different CDs and I think you can get their stuff. I know you can get their stuff on Spotify and elsewhere. So she is with them from the time she founds the order at 70 until her death, I believe at the age of 95. And there’s a couple details about her death that stuck out to me. The first is that the sisters, even before this recent controversy or news, fame, attention, whatever you want to call it about exhuming her body, they were referring to her as their treasure.

So in the pamphlets that they already had, they talked about burying their treasure when they buried her. Additionally, she was in a simple wooden casket. She is not in some special hermetically sealed coffin or something like this. And she’s got a pretty simple burial. Significantly, she’s not even embalmed. Now, I mentioned this before with the printed material, but in an interview, mother Abbot Cecilia, the one who I mistakenly thought was the foundress, said she was the treasurer of our community and bedrock of charity. Now she says that in 2019. Now, why do I mention all of this? Because there’s a detail I know that I don’t believe is publicly available. And I know this because of one of the connections I have. One of my aunts is a Benedictine nun and with a couple other Benedictine nuns had stayed in this community in Goward.

They weren’t part of the community, but complicated situation. They were staying with them for a while and they kept in touch. They have a lot of connections. And so my aunt had passed something along to my family saying one of the sisters had had a dream in which she heard it’s time to dig up the treasure that you buried. And so even before they dug her up and found her to be incorruptible, they suspected that might be what happened. And so they exhumed her body on the anniversary of her death, I believe. And sure enough, they found her in this seemingly incorruptible state. So what does that mean? What’s the science and the spirituality about the incorruptibility of the saints? That’s a complicated question. Now, the spirituality side is actually fairly straightforward. There’s plenty of passages about God not allowing his holy ones to seek corruption.

Now, that refers first and foremost to the fact that Christ won’t stay in the grave, that his body won’t decompose and rot. But occasionally, and by occasionally we’re looking at maybe a hundred cases that we know of. There are saints who in whole or in part seem to have been miraculously preserved from bodily corruption. Now, sometimes that is a seemingly permanent process. Other times it’s just for a while that years after they’ve died, they’ll exhume their body, particularly if they’ve become canonized as a saint. Say they’ll exhume their body to put it in a church. And lo and behold, they’re in this remarkable state where it looks like they died yesterday and then after that they might decompose. But there is some seeming divine confirmation of their being holy. Now, we’re going to make a couple scientific kind of nuances, but I’m looking just at the spirituality here, that there’s something here that seems to point to contrary to what you would expect in the merely natural order of things.

They’ve been preserved and they’ve been preserved not by men, not by embalming, not by any of these things, but by God. So that’s the idea of an incorruptible saint. There are all sorts of distinctions that we could make. It doesn’t look that sometimes it’s just like the heart will be preserved from corruption or a significant organ or part of the body. And again, it can be for some time or can be seemingly in perpetuity. And then to make this more complicated, frequently when a saint is exhumed, they’ll put wax over their body. Especially if it’s something like an incorruptible saint. So particularly in the case of Sister Wilhelmina, I know for a fact they put a thin layer of wax over her because a lot of people are going to be handling her body. So for a variety of sanitary reasons, it’s important to do that.

So this complicates the whole process of incorruptibility and how we measure these things. So from this point on, there’s all sorts of complicating factors, but we do know that four years after she died, she was exhumed and without any embalming, without any kind of special hermetically sealed coffin, we find her in this state that appears better than what one could reasonably have expected. I’m couching that in as careful terms as I can for as simple reason that the science on this is weirdly complicated. I don’t understand it super well. I’ve done my best to read up on it. I definitely have the search history of a serial killer right now because I’ve got a lot of searches on my work computer about how long a body goes to decompose in Missouri, which is close to where I live, and I was getting a little uneasy by it.

Nevertheless, I’ll talk a little bit about what I understand to be the case with the science. So I’ll even cite my sources as well. So taxonomy is the study of fossilization, but it’s related to decomposition in humans or animals or whatever. So taxonomy, if human remains is an academic book that looks at the forensic analysis of the dead and the environment in which we find their body. So are they above ground? Are they buried? Are they in hot or cold climates? Is it wet, is it dry? All of those things matter, but there’s actually a surprising amount of debate about how much they matter because there’s conventional wisdom on this and then there’s some challenges to that. So in this book, one of the articles talks about how an increase in temperature has been repeatedly demonstrated to drive biological and chemical reactions, which break down the body into the compounds that will eventually enter the surrounding soil.

Now that makes sense. If you leave food or you leave milk or you leave anything perishable out in hot weather or in your house or in the fridge, they’re going to go bad at different rates. And the hotter it is, the quicker they’ll spoil, the quicker they’ll go bad. And the same is true if human remains, that if you leave a body outdoors in the heat, decomposition will set in very quickly. So that’s one of the factors.

And then temperature increase means faster decomposition, cooler temperatures decrease the rate of decomposition. Nevertheless, in that same book, another article says, “Yeah, we need to be cautious about this because even though there are commonly accepted things in the industry.” For instance, there’s a claim that a buried body takes eight times longer to decompose than one on the ground surface. There’s really not good evidence to support the kind of conventional wisdom within the field that this is all a fairly young forensic field. And moreover, y you are dealing with a pretty imperfect data set when you’re dealing with bodies that you find above ground or below ground. You can’t just get a bunch of volunteers to die. You can’t just kill a bunch of people for the sake of science to compare how fast they decompose. And so same article mentions that there are several things that are believed to impact the rate of decomposition. Whether the remains are repeatedly disturbed. Whether they’re burial or whether the person isn’t buried, the influence of different insects.

Penetrating trauma, was the person stabbed pre decomposition, charring? Was there some burning to the body whether they’re wearing clothes or not, decomposition and hanging remains maggot generated heat on decomposition. Look, I’m sorry, it’s a gross subject. I can’t help that. And then whether there’s like a mass grave. Now significantly, those were all the things that are believed to be important. But Ty Simmons who writes this article says the majority of these have shown little, the majority, excuse me, the majority of good studies on this have shown little of any significant difference in rate of decomposition. So we have conventional wisdom that seems to make sense that certain conditions are going to lead to faster decomposition, and you’ll find experts in the field who say, this is my clinical experience. We don’t actually have a ton of good scholarly studies that support what the experts have observed.

So we have a hunch, but we want to be careful not to make it look like more than a hunch. Nevertheless, we can say this, there’s no set timetable that all bodies kind of decompose on, and we can still say there is a general timeline that other than really extreme cases, we’re not dealing with a difference of years. It’s a much smaller difference than that. So for instance, Lorraine Lance, who is writing for Bio SoCal now. Bio SoCal, they do cleaning services if someone has died in a traffic accident or even if you have animal remains, they do all of this in Southern California. It’s a gross business practice, but somebody’s got to do it.

And they have an article called What does a dead body look like after one year? Now notice this is one year, this isn’t four years. I had enough searches about exhuming a body after four years or the rate of decomposition after four years in Missouri that I was just getting a little nervous and thought, “Okay, this is the best I can do and if I do this much longer, the police are going to come to my house and wonder why I’m doing this.”

Probably wouldn’t have happened, but I couldn’t shake that feeling of like this is going to be flagged by somebody at work at Google. I don’t know. Nevertheless, in this article, Lorraine Lance explains that if you were to view a body after a year of burial, you may see as little as the skeleton laid duress in the soil or as much as the body’s still recognizable with all the clothes intact. But that it depends on things like what was done to the body before burial and what condition it was buried. So which gives example in a cemetery for instance, where bodies are buried in different ways, in different times, you could have two bodies in the same stage of decomposition. We’ll get into those stages in a second buried 10 years apart for the most part. However, if a non embalmed body was viewed one year after burial, it would already be significantly decomposed.

The soft tissue’s gone and only the bones in some other body parts remaining, that’s a year after for an un-embalmed body. And it’s worth pointing out, that’s just not what we see here. Now, I’d say all this because, so actually as we’re driving back from Gower, having seen the body. My wife says to me, well, what is normal for a body after four years? And I realize I don’t. I’ve never seen an exhumed body four years later, and it was surprisingly difficult to find any super clear answer. This is the clearest one after a year that you would oftentimes expect or generally expect for the most part expect significant decomposition. And so there are five stages of decomposition. You have what’s called fresh where the person, you might see them at a wake or something, and then very quickly you have the bloating of the body and then you have active decay where flies and other insects start to… Maggots. All sorts of animals start to consume the body, this then leads to advanced decay, and then you eventually have just dry remains, just a skeleton.

I am, again, not an expert, but it does not appear that we are in the bloat, active decay, advanced decay or dry remain stage. That if you were to look at those five different possible conditions of the body, fresh seems like the one that best describes. Again, I’m seeing as a layman now, I’m happy to see any expert kind of jump in on this. But in the numerous news articles I’ve seen, I haven’t seen any experts actually offer an opinion about whether this is, how unusual is it to see a body in this state? There’s one more book that I wanted to mention, which is Human Body Decomposition, as mentioned a lot of weird reading. But in this book, Jarvis Haman and Mark Oxenham give a little bit of a timeline. Again, the timeline’s going to have a lot of variation, but they say that from the time the cadaver cools to ambient temperature.

In other words, when the body reaches room temperature and until it becomes a skeleton soft tissue decomposes by aerobic and anaerobic bacterial action. This is called autolysis. It is, in other words, the body devouring itself or more accurately parts of the body or the bacteria in the body consuming the body for nutrition. But it appears the body’s eating itself from within, and so it’s the disruption and disintegration of cell walls, and they point out it varies depending on the surrounding environmental conditions, but generally begins in bodies buried in graves at 48 to 72 hours after death. So we’re not talking about four years. That we would expect to find this process beginning within a couple days of burial. And then this process gradually blends into what’s called putrefaction, which is characterized by decomposition occurring in an anaerobic environment. So sorry again for the gross level of detail, but all that’s to say based on everything I’m reading, it certainly seems like something miraculous has happened here.

Now, I want to give one additional set of caveats and one reason why I’m not just unqualified endorsing. “Yes, this is definitely a miracle.” There are certain climactic conditions and certain other things that can impact this process. So for instance, if a person is in water. If a body is, you know, you’d drown a sea, you’re not going to decompose them the same way that you don’t have any of the insects. It’s just a whole different process. Additionally, if you’ve got an extremely arid, an extremely dry climate, it can also change this. This is similar by the way to why certain conditions are better for preserving manuscripts. So if you wonder why are the Dead Seas scrolls and all these other ancient scrolls from Egypt or from caves in like Quran, it’s because it’s a cool dry place in an arid climate. And so you don’t have a lot of moisture and you don’t have a lot of things that create bacteria in the conditions that break down everything, bodies, manuscripts, you name it.

None of these, as far as I can tell, apply. You also have things like if there’s a certain pH like acidity, you have things like bogs. So there’s a couple cases of famous bog burials where they’re extremely ancient bodies that are in remarkable condition because they’ve been artificial… Well, not artificially, they’ve been naturally preserved because of the bog that they were in. All of those are strange exceptions. High latitudes are the same thing. Again, none of these seem to apply to rural Missouri an hour from Kansas City. It’s a temperate zone, seems like it’s not the conditions one would expect, the sort of natural occurring preservation of a body. Nevertheless, maybe there’s some case I don’t know about, maybe there’s some perfectly valid reason why her body is in such good condition that doesn’t involve this being a miracle. That then brings us to the role of miracles.

Now, I’d just say at the outset, as a Catholic, I’m free. We are free to accept or reject this miracle. I’m free to think, “No, this is probably a naturally occurring phenomenon or I’m free to think God seems to actually be at work here.” But if I’m not a Catholic, it seems like I’d be dogmatically committed to denying the miraculous nature of this regardless of the evidence. Here’s why I say that because certainly if this is miraculous it, this woman who seemed to be a Catholic visionary. Who was extremely Catholic, who had Catholic views on the Eucharist, on the Virgin Mary, not just from her own theology, but also because of supernatural vision she claimed to have had. Well, the idea that God would supernaturally preserve someone who was a false prophetess, certainly beggars belief, right?

In the same way that we did a whole series just over the last few weeks on the resurrection. And it’s certainly a strange idea that Jesus could have risen from the dead if he wasn’t really who he said he was or for that matter. That you just have a fluke situation where the body just disappeared somehow and some random coincidence when Jesus was saying after three days this is going to happen, and then three days later, there you go, it happened.

So again, as a believer, I’m free to accept or reject any of these miraculous claims. I don’t have to believe every miracle is true. I don’t have to believe every Mary apparition or you name it. It’s true. I don’t have to believe every visionary is really having visions. I don’t have to believe every healing is a miracle and not a natural healing. I’m free to accept or reject any of those things. I’m free to believe a certain case is possession or is mental illness? But the person who doesn’t believe can’t put any of those things in the supernatural category without basically admitting the validity of that category. You see what I mean? So someone who doesn’t believe in the demonic can’t give you even one case of authentic possession. Now, we don’t say a hundred percent of cases are demonic possession. We don’t even believe a majority of cases are, but they are committed to none.

We’re open to however many the evidence suggests. So it’s one of those remarkable areas where, as a believer, I’m actually freer to handle the evidence wherever it leads. If it turns out this is totally a natural process and there’s just some facet of this that I don’t know about. Fine, that’s not going to discredit Christianity just, “Oh, that’s pretty cool.” Science is weird, nature is fascinating, but if it’s real, that certainly does discredit those who would deny the Catholic positions on the Eucharist, on women’s religious orders, on Mary and any of these things. So again, as a Catholic, I’m much freer to accept the evidence.

Now in evangelization, we can say a few things. First, we know from Exodus that miracles were important to the Israelites belief. So for instance, after the Red Sea where God rescues Israel and drowns the invading Egyptian army. We’re told that Israel saw the great work which the Lord did against the Egyptians, and the people feared the Lord and they believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses, that one of the ways that the Old Testament claims are proven is through miracles. And this is true as well in the New Testament, Jesus says, do not believe them in the Father and the Father in me.

Then he says, the words I say to you, “I do not speak in my own authority. But the Father who dwells in me does his works, and then he says, believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” You can believe Jesus on the sake of his claims about himself, the teaching and all the things he’s saying, or you can believe these divine things that he’s doing. But then he goes on and says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do and greater works than these he will do because I go to the Father.” So the apostles and subsequent Christians are called on to perform miraculous works. Now, sometimes these are things that they have some degree of control over.

Other times it’s things like a body being incorruptible, where obviously the saint themselves isn’t the act agent. They’re receiving something supernatural is happening to them that they’re not causing, right? Like we’re not saying the saint preserves their own body. Nevertheless, it’s clear that this role of what scripture calls signs and wonders and works is an important part of the faith. In Acts two, St. Peter gets up on Pentecost and says, men of Israel hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders in signs, which God did through him in your midst. As you yourself know, that’s how he introduces Jesus. That here’s someone who isn’t just a great teacher who we know did miracles or God did miracles through. And then later on in Act II, we’re told that fear came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles.

So this is true not just of Jesus, but of the apostles as well. So there is this important dimension in which we shouldn’t run away from the supernatural. It’s easy to turn religion into a purely natural phenomenon like, “Hey, this makes sense. This is a coherent vision of the universe.” This is a coherent vision of the human person, and all of that is well and good and true, and so you can believe it on that basis. But nevertheless, we shouldn’t miss the supernatural dimension and we shouldn’t miss it when we’re proclaiming the faith like, “Yeah, it’s weird, right?” We’ve got bodies preserved from corruption. You’ve got the bones of an Old Testament prophet raising somebody back to life. You’ve got the handkerchief of Paul being brought, and you’ve got people walking to get Peter’s shadow or lying to get Peter shadow to go by them so they can be healed.

All of that grittiness is weird to modern people, I get that. But nevertheless, if this is one of the ways that God is at work in the world, I don’t think we should run away from that. So again, I’m not saying go blindly believe all miracles, but I do think we need to watch out for the danger of being ashamed of the miraculous. Because these skeptical vision that says miracles can’t happen in the modern world is a no to faith and a no to divine action. That makes it very hard because then even if a person says then that they believe, what are they believing? If you don’t believe God can work in the world or you don’t believe that he is at work in the world when he says he is, it’s just a strange almost deistic worldview. Deism, the idea God creates the world, he winds it up like a clock, and then he lets it go.

Well, we don’t believe in that. As Christians, we believe that God is actively at work in the world, and this is one of the reasons why these signs and wonders continue. So I hope you enjoy, I hope are at least intrigued by this seemingly miraculous event with Sister Wilhelmina. But whatever you take of her particular case, I think it’s a good reminder that we should take very seriously the role of the miraculous and Christianity, and particularly in Catholicism. For Shameless, Pope, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Hope you enjoy. Please like, comment, share, all that good stuff. God bless.

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