New Padre Pio Story?

Question

I was on the Coast to Coast am website where I came across this story

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/face-to-face--with-the--mystic-monk-1359824.html

I'm baffled by this story. How can a body be exhumed 40 years after the man's death and still look like he died recently? Is this a hoax story?

Answer 1

For Catholics this sometimes happens to those who are considered saints. There is the body of St. Francis Xavier

in Goa still intact, and St Bernadette in France, just to mention two others whose bodies are also not corrupt.

Believers (and you have to be one to feel this) will tell you that these are signs from God that these are holy people who led good lives of service to mankind.

Volumes have been written about this phenomena over the years, many by "rationalist" scientists from the last century

who sought to disprove these events as fakes.They either ended up as converts to the faith or as silent observers to something that was just a bit beyond their abilities to fathom.

Interestingly, in a mass exhumation and reburial of bodies carried out in Singapore a few years ago, to make way for a new underground railway line, there were two corpses found intact from the earlier part of the 20th.century. They were known to have been pious Catholics who were ordinary folk, and not priests or nuns. Amazingly the relatives of one of them had the intact body cremated! Almost a hundred years after she had died!

And there is great excitement amongst relatives of mine in Singapore right now about Padre Pio. Many are attempting

to organise flights and hotels  for those wishing to go to Italy

to see the body of this Saint, ever since the news broke about this.