GOWER, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) — The topic of incorruptibility is one which has recently unexpectedly been placed at the forefront of many people’s thoughts, whether Catholic or not, due to the discovery of Mother Wilhelmina Lancaster of the Most Holy Rosary in an apparently incorrupt state.
On April 28, the body of Mother Wilhelmina of the Most Holy Rosary, foundress of the Benedictine Sisters of Mary, Queen of the Apostles, was exhumed and discovered to be apparently incorrupt, the current abbess of the community, Mother Cecilia, OSB, told EWTN.
How was the body found?
“We think she is the first African American woman to be found incorrupt,” Mother Cecilia said.
The nuns have provided details about Mother Wilhelmina’s discovery and the state of her body, as it was discovered when they went to transfer her remains to a more permanent resting place.
Following her death and burial in 2019, her body had not been embalmed. The wooden coffin in which she was buried was cracked, allowing dirt and moisture into the coffin. Her body was covered “in a layer of mold that had grown due to the high levels of condensation within the cracked coffin,” but despite this damp state, “little of her body and nothing of her habit disintegrated during the four years.”
While the skeletal remains of the deceased nun should have weighed around 20 pounds, mother Cecilia stated they weighed “between 80-90 pounds” the the community lifted their foundress out of the grave. The description further adds:
Not only was her body in a remarkable preserved condition, her crown and bouquet of flowers were dried in place; the profession candle with the ribbon, her crucifix, and rosary were all intact.
“Even more remarkable was the complete preservation of her holy habit, made from natural fibers, for which she fought so vigorously throughout her religious life. The synthetic veil was perfectly intact, while the lining of the coffin, made of similar material, was completely deteriorated and gone.”
In a later testimony, Mother Cecilia added how “there were bugs eating at the foam under her [Mother Wilhelmina], but none had touched her body or her habit – the latter’s failure to deteriorate being a phenomenon just as miraculous as her intact body!”
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The nuns, as now well-known due to the testimony of the thousands of pilgrims who visited, placed the body of Mother Wilhelmina on a bier for visiting pilgrims to see and venerate. Prior to doing this, they performed some basic cleansing of her face “with hot water, because clinging to her face was basically a mask of thick mold.” The layer of mold was due to the ingress of moisture from the damp conditions of the coffin.
What denotes someone as incorrupt?
The nuns and many pilgrims swiftly hailed the discovery as the finding of an incorruptible. “You can’t Google ‘what do you do with an incorrupt body?’,” stated Mother Cecilia of their discovery. “God is real. He protected that body and that habit to enkindle our faith, to rekindle it, to bring people back to the faith.”
But how to distinguish an incorrupt body from one which has not yet decayed? The topic of incorrupt saints is one which has fascinated many Catholics and non-Catholics, yet writing on the matter is surprisingly little.
Firstly, the discovery of a person as being incorrupt is not (as a rule) taken as a miracle to be used in the canonization process, nor does natural corruption somehow preclude one from being canonized. The very declaration of a body as being incorrupt is the result of a process filled with much study into the manner of burial, the way the body was preserved, and the treatment given to it after its exhumation.
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Prospero Cardinal Lambertini, who later became Pope Benedict XIV, 1675-1758, wrote a lengthy work called De Beatificatione Servorum Dei et de Beatorum Canonizatione, including in it the chapter De Cadaverum Incorruptione, which “remains the classic reference for such matters.”
As noted by Fr. William Saunders in 2006, the future pope wrote that bodies which were found intact but which disintegrated in later years were not deemed miraculous. Cardinal Lambertini, wrote Saunders, stated that the only bodily remains he considered “extraordinary and thereby miraculous would be those which had not undergone some preservation process but had retained their lifelike color, freshness and flexibility for many years after death.”
Such conditions would be “indicative of the person’s mortal remains being prepared for the glorious resurrection of the body.”
Although the Church is very reluctant to accept incorruptibility as a miracle in the process of canonizing a person, it nevertheless does testify to the holiness of the person, and indeed exceptions have been made to this general rule.
A more commonly known text on the subject is Joan Carroll Cruz’s book “The Incorruptibles: A Study of the Incorruption of the Bodies of Various Catholic Saints and Beati.” Cruz presents details of over 100 saints and blesseds, who were or are still incorrupt.
The number is a non-exhaustive one, as Cruz notes, but more importantly she examines the details regarding a body’s burial, discovery, and reported preservation. A motive for undertaking the extensive study was the discovery of “so many errors and false impressions concerning those preservations.”
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She distinguished between three kinds of bodies:
- Deliberately preserved
- Accidentally preserved
- And the incorruptibles
Many of the deliberately preserved are of the kind who have undergone rigorous embalming techniques, such as were practiced by the ancient civilizations. In contrast, the incorrupt bodies of Catholics “have challenged the opinions of skeptics and contradicted and defied the laws of nature,” Cruz writes.
She highlights the importance of distinguishing between accidental preservation and a true incorrupt body. One sign which would indicate to a true incorrupt body is its preservation despite the presence of water: “moisture is the principle deterrent in the formation of natural or accidental mummies,” Cruz notes.
While hot, dry climates lend themselves to natural preservations, the addition of moisture normally would lead to a natural decaying of the body.
But, she notes, where the incorrupt bodies differ from those which have merely been expertly and deliberately preserved by human hands is that “the products of the deliberate and accidental preservations, without exception, have been not more than shriveled species, always rigid and extremely dry.”
In contrast, “most of the incorruptibles, however, are neither dry nor rigid but quite moist and flexible, even after the passage of centuries.” She continues:
Moreover, their preservations have been accomplished under conditions that would naturally foster and encourage putrefaction, and they have survived circumstances that would have unquestionably necessitated and resulted in the destruction of the others.
In order for a body to mummify naturally, it must be done quickly and in dry conditions — both aspects which were absent during Mother Wilhelmina’s burial, according to the account provided by the community. Instead, the nuns recounted the significant presence of moisture in her coffin, which they discovered upon exhuming her. As Cruz notes, “moisture is the chief factor that encourages dissolution, yet many of the incorruptibles encountered this condition during their entombments, their preservations being inexplicably maintained in spite of it.”
Cruz also notes how some saints whose remains have been examined during their canonization process, had been preserved for many years but later fallen into dissolution. Such cases “had no detracting effect whatsoever on their causes,” she adds.
Of the many accounts she presents, the range is very full with some saints appearing in almost lifelike condition, while others are less so. Some were exhumed in a well preserved state — despite their burial conditions — but later began to decay in part due to being displayed for public veneration for so long.
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Others are different still: St. Francis de Sales was found “perfectly conserved” when exhumed ten years after his death during his beatification process, but “only dust and bones were found” when examined at an unspecified later date. Still other saints are presented for public veneration from behind glass cases in an apparently incorrupt form, but due to wax moulds placed on their faces.
With as yet an official declaration to be made regarding the nature of Mother Wilhelmina’s body and whether it is deemed by Church officials to meet the conditions required for being incorrupt, the impact that her apparently incorrupt body has already had cannot be denied.
Thousands of pilgrims flocked to view her body before it was translated to its permanent resting place, and reports of physical healings under her intercession have begun to emerge. Regardless of when such a declaration of incorruptibility is made or not, the Benedictine nuns are sure of the impact that Mother Wilhelmina’s body is having:
God is real. He protected that body and that habit to enkindle our faith, to rekindle it, to bring people back to the faith.