I watched Hannity's America on Fox, Sunday night, 10/14, and they did a piece in the segment called "Beyond Belief" entitled "The Incorruptibles."
I had never heard of this term before. This comes from the Catholic church.
According to the Catholic church, these people were declared saints and their bodies did not decay.
So far there is no scientific explanation for this. My thought is could this be part of the "Lying signs and wonders" as spoken of in Matthew 24:25 "For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect."
This link is to a Catholic web site with such an example: http://catholicpilgrims.com/lourdes/ba_bernadette_intro.htm
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http://www.nhne.com/misc/incorruptibles.html
Lucca Italy
Over the last 15 years, however, a new view of the Incorruptibles has begun to emerge. At the Vatican's request, Italian pathologists, chemists, and radiologists have been poring over the bodies of the ancient men and women interred in church reliquaries. Charged with gleaning new information about the lives of the saints and assisting in the conservation of sacred remains, they have also brought science to the altars of Europe's cathedrals. Already, they have examined more than two dozen saints and beati, shedding light on the mystery of their preservation. While some saints were clearly mummified by their devout followers, others were protected from decay by environmental conditions, raising new questions about incorruptibility. "What is a miracle?" asks Ezio Fulcheri, a pathologist at the University of Genoa and one of the leading researchers on the Incorruptibles. "It's something unexplainable, a special event that may occur in different ways." The causes may seem mysterious "but don't exclude [rare] natural processes that are different from the normal course of things."
Years ago, I had viewed several of the "Incorruptibles" in Italy while studying there. They were remarkable in one way, closed in their clase cases, but yet again, they were not "dewy-skinned" as if they had perished only recently. I had not expected some of them to look as mummified as they did, so I suppose one's idea of "miraculous" in this situation could vary from person to person. As a child growing up in the Roman Catholic church I was taught that God preserved these bodies, in part to vaildate the "sainthood" of the deceased, and to glorify His name. I had been given the impression then that these people looked as if they had not been deceased long, but that was not appearance I experienced.
Viewing these bodies as an adult believer in the saving grace of Jesus Christ and Him alone, I found
them to be simply interesting, if not macabre. "Miraculous" did not seem a fitting description of the condition of these bodies when I saw them, not even to attribute them to the "lying signs and wonders" of Satan and his minions.
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