Just curious. They put him in a cypruss wood casket inside a stone tomb.
How long will the cask last? 20 years? 100 years? 1000 years?
Also, have they ever opened any tombs in the vatican?
Just curious…
MtM
Just curious. They put him in a cypruss wood casket inside a stone tomb.
How long will the cask last? 20 years? 100 years? 1000 years?
Also, have they ever opened any tombs in the vatican?
Just curious…
MtM
He’s in three caskets, I thought. Cypress, then lead, then oak.
When they exhumed John XXIII in 2000 he was pretty well preserved (nearly 40 years after death, because of all those layers), but I don’t know the state of his coffin itself.
Interestingly, I went to check my own claim there and found various claims that the outer wood casket is oak, elm, or walnut. I don’t know which it is.
If you keep the wood dry, it should last almost indefinitely. But I’m not sure what happens when you slap a body in it and then seal it hermetically in a lead casket. If I had to guess, it would be that there would be some initial rotting of the wood but barring an influx of moisture, it would eventually dry out and the remaining wood would then last for centuries. (There are, at least supposedly, relics of the true cross lying around, so keeping wood for a couple of millennia isn’t that big a deal.)
In accordance with his will, he is not buried in a stone tomb. Three coffins, buried in earth. He initially wanted to be returned to Poland, but later decided to leave it in the hands of the Cardinals.
Cool stuff!
Any idea of who the oldest pope to be exhumed was? And what are the circumstances of having to exhume bodies?
MtM
According to the BBC the three coffins are made of cedar followed by zinc then a walnut outer one.
Almost all other sources indicate a cypress inner coffin, followed by either a lead or zinc metal coffin, followed by either a walnut or oak outer coffin. Yesterday, all I heard for the metal was zinc, but it appears that lead is a traditional choice and many sites are reporting it as lead. The outer coffin appears from pictures to be a light colour, indicating oak to me and not walnut, but I’ve seen no concensus as to exactly what species of wood it is.
-DFF
What is the difference between cypress and cedar? Is it the same wood under a different name ? Some of the reports I have read and heard say cedar and some say cypress
From the look of it, the gravesite has the top of it properly built into the floor of the crypt, out of worked stone with a nice carved cover slab, and the bottom cut into the earth/bedrock of Vatican Hill. It is the former burial place of John XXIII, who got transferred to a more honored entombment in the Basilica upon beatification.
The confusion with the woods involved may have to do with different terminology used by Italian-speaking vs. English-speaking woodworkers, as in the term-of-art for a particular worked wood may not map through to the same actual plant species across languages (and the metal middle coffin has been variously addressed around my media as tin, lead or zinc; my suspicion is that the term used by the mortuary may be something like “plate”, that does not really describe the specific element)
IIRC, if it’s hermetically sealed, there’s gonna be a big stink when they open it, since the anaerobic bacteria will really go to town.
I don’t understand why they would ever open it. Is there some good reason?
The church will sometime exhume bodies in order to elevate someone to sainthood. Some saints are said to be “Incorruptible” meaning their body does not decompose like a normal persons.
See
http://www.catholicpilgrims.com/lourdes/ba_bernadette_intro.htm
you will see some amazing pictures of the body of Saint Bernadette
Though the main reason the beatified/canonized are exhumed is to move them to a more honored site (read: somewhere where you can draw more pilgrims).
The prior occupant of this grave, John XXIII, was moved from to a chapel in the Basilica itself upon his beatification (last stop before “saint”). He was in an outstanding state of preservation, BUT the Vatican very explicitly said they attributed that to a very good embalming job.
BTW, in the link Qwisp provides, click the “Body of St. Bernadette” button in the left-hand menu: it goes to a relation of the Medical Examiner reports of exhumations in 1909, 1919, and 1925 – it clearly shows that the experts observe an apparent “spontaneous mummification” but also that every time it was re-exposed to the elements the decay process would start again. (BTW it also includes a rather unsettlingly casual relation of harvesting her for relics during the latter exhumations…). It also reveals that what you see today is not directly her face as-is, but a retouched death-mask:
In the case of John, they were moving him to a different resting spot, up to the main basilica level. They opened the coffin(s) as part of a recognition ceremony and moved him to a glass coffin.
There have been some gruesome reasons for exhumations. Pope Stephen VII exhumed his predecessor to put the corpse on trial.
Cypress is a very, very hard wood. Cedar is soft and is often used for carving. I have heard several times that the coffin that was on display was cypress. I heard it mentioned once, I think, that the cypress coffin was placed in zinc which was then placed in oak and that this outer coffin was placed on a marble slab in the earth.
I did see a glimpse of the burial itself and there did seem to be a slab of some sort that looked similar to marble.
I know that coffins are often sealed in a lead vault, so the mention of zinc caught my attention.
Why do I suddenly have a craving for turducken?
Worth noting is the oldest known tree, Methuselah , 4,767 years out in the rough and still kicking. Wood can be very durable indeed.
If cypress was indeed used for the outer casket as I had heard it should last a very long time, even in a bit of damp. Cypress wood is well known for it’s rot resisting properties, it’s been used for a long long time where contact between wood and ground or stone is necessary.
It is an honest estimation on my part that the coffin will last a lot longer than the Catholic Church or even Christianity.