Sister Wilhelmina's 'undecaying' body does not necessarily make her a saint

Thousands of people have queued up over the last week to see and touch the apparently incorrupt body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, who died in 2019 aged 95.

She looked as she had done in life, like Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act, clad in a full black habit with white wimple. Her career was very different from the film’s publicity-mad pseudo-nun. Sister Wilhelmina had founded the Benedictine convent of Mary Queen of Apostles in rural Missouri as a strictly contemplative order, and she died in the odour of sanctity, as the phrase is.

After her death, her sisters in religion shovelled earth on to her coffin with long-handled shovels, though dressed in full-length nuns’ habits, white headdresses and black veils. It was part of their foundress’s charism to express inner faithfulness to their vocation through the external sign of a religious habit.

When Sister Wilhelmina’s body was exhumed to allow building work, there was no odour and her body had not decayed. One radio station declared: “Religious experts say the lack of decay is a sign of holiness in Catholicism.” But is that true?

Saints and their mortal remains

A strong counter-example is St John Henry Newman (1801-90). Before he was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Britain in 2010, his remains were exhumed. They were to be reburied in a nice green marble sarcophagus in the Birmingham Oratory that he founded. But when his coffin was dug up, no human remains were to be seen – only a coffin plate and bits of cloth and wood.

Newman’s beatification went ahead and he was declared a saint in 2019. His body was said to have dissolved in the damp ground. It is worth noting, though, that if his remains had been found they would have been venerated as relics.

A connection is seen between saints in heaven and their mortal remains. Every church altar is provided with its own saintly relics. The idea relates to the Creed recited each Sunday, one clause of which professes belief in the “resurrection of the body”. This in turn is believed to be a consequence of the resurrection of Jesus.

The notion of incorruptible bodies fits in here, for the traditional belief is that when Jesus was lying dead in his tomb, his body did not undergo corruption. A prophetic verse in Psalm 16 is quoted: “Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell, neither shalt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.”

An ‘unpleasant impression’ for the public

Yet no one thought a Christian’s body decaying was a sign of a bad life. It was round the other way: that by a special providence of God, some holy people’s bodies were incorrupt, just as their remains could perform miraculous cures.

A classic case is the body of St Bernadette Soubirous, who died in 1879, 21 years after reporting visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. When her body was exhumed in 1925, an examining doctor was impressed by the lack of internal decay “above all the totally unexpected state of the liver after 46 years”. He had expected it to have decomposed rapidly or hardened to a chalky consistency. “Yet, when it was cut it was soft and almost normal in consistency.”

Even so, a wax mask was made for the face since, as one pious commentator observed, “the blackish tinge to the face and the sunken eyes and nose would make an unpleasant impression on the public”.

Incorruption remains a subject that seldom crosses the mind of practising Christians, any more than paranormal phenomena such as levitation in life or healing oil exuding from a body after death.

A rare interest in it was taken by Lorenzo Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV. His job as Promoter of the Faith (popularly known as the Devil’s Advocate) was to find reasons not to canonise people. His long Latin treatise on the process of canonisation includes a section on incorruption, “De cadaverum incorruptione.”

To count as incorrupt, he concluded, a body should retain flexibility, colour and freshness for many years after death. As he wrote before being elected pope in 1740, his thoughts bear no special authority.

The relic hunter and the little toe

One example shows the difficulty of pinning the subject down. The remains of St Lucy were reputed to be incorrupt, though she died in AD 304. Her body is venerated at the church of St Geremia in Venice, since her church of Santa Lucia was demolished in 1861 to make way for the railway station. Her body was on public display, but the future Pope John XXIII when Patriarch of Venice in the 1950s was so horrified by the appearance of her mummy-like face that he ordered a silver mask to be made for it.

Rebecca George, an anthropology instructor at Western Carolina University in North Carolina, has been widely quoted on Sister Wilhelmina’s preservation, saying that the “mummification” of unembalmed bodies is common and bodies could stay preserved for many years.

Certainly dozens of saints’ bodies are reputedly incorrupt. Among the better known are St Catherine of Siena (died 1380), whose head is on show in the basilica of St Dominic in Siena, though not a pretty sight; St Rita of Cascia, the patron saint of impossible causes (died 1457); and St Francis Xavier (died 1552) from whose body, kept in Goa, a Portuguese relic-hunter, Dona Isabel de Carom, bit off the little toe of the right foot in 1554. Luckily Sister Wilhelmina is now safely preserved in a glass-fronted case.