Joan Carroll Cruz - The Incorruptibles: A Study of Incorruption in the Bodies of Various Catholic Saints and Beati

The Incorruptibles

A Study of the Incorruption of the Bodies of Various Catholic Saints and Beati

By Joan Carroll Cruz

The bodies of holy martyrs, and others now living with Christ, bodies which were His members and temples of the Holy Spirit, which one day are to be raised up by Him and made glorious in everlasting life, are to be venerated by the faithful; God gives men many benefits through them.

The Council of Trent

TAN Books

Charlotte, North Carolina

Nihil Obstat: Msgr. Henry C. Bezou

Censor Librorum

November 11, 1974

Imprimatur: Most Rev. Philip M. Hannan

Archbishop of New Orleans

November 19, 1974

Copyright 1977 by Joan Carroll Cruz

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-93992

ISBN: 978-0-89555-066-8

ISBN Mobi: 978-0-89555-950-0

ISBN Epub: 978-0-89555-953-1

Cover design by Chris Pelicano

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

TAN Books

Charlotte, North Carolina

1977

Blessed are the pure of heart: for they shall see God.

Matthew 5:8

To the memory of my sister,

Elba Carroll Moore, who sees God

Contents

Writing comes second for Mrs. Joan Carroll Cruz, a New Orleans housewife and mother of five children, not that she is a second-rate writerfar from it. She simply cannot tolerate writing if there is housework left undone. For this reason she usually writes at night, when her regular work is finished. Actually, she writes every other night, during the wee hours of the morning, often rising by 2:00 a.m. to sit down to her typewriter. That is the only time I have enough uninterrupted quiet to get anything done, she states. She catches up with rest on alternate nights.

The catalyst that initiated her writing career was a challenge from her niece. Already she had done considerable reading in the lives of the Saints and was well aware of the phenomenon of incorruption when a family discussion evolved to the subject. She was noting that there are so many contradictions in this area that she would like to see someone write a book to clarify matters. When her niece challenged her to write one, the idea did not seem so far-fetched, and she accepted. After working a while on the project, she laid it aside, thinking herself unequal to the task. But later she resumed it with renewed vigor, and The Incorruptibles is the result.

During the research on this book, she conceived the outline of a novel inspired by the life of King Edward the Confessor of England, a work she pursued immediately upon completion of The Incorruptibles . It is now in print with the title The Desires of Thy Heart . Published by Tandem Press in hardbound, it quickly went through two printings and was accepted by New American Library for a pocket-book edition under the Signet label. It was their lead book for November, 1977, with an initial printing of 550,000. Three companies are interested in the movie rights.

Already she has completed a second novel, Love Endures Forever , which appeared in the summer of 1978, and two childrens stories, Butterflies Clap Their Wings and Fish Fan Their Fins , which came out at approximately the same time. Books in progress include a novel entitled The Mustard Seed , a childrens fantasy called The Crystal Forest and a nonfiction Catholic work. The more I write and research, the more ideas I get for new books, she says.

A native of New Orleans, Mrs. Cruz is the educational product of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, having attended grade school, high school and college under their tutelage. She attended boarding school at St. Mary of the Pines in Chatawa, Mississippi, and went to Notre Dame Junior College in St. Louis, Missouri. She is married to Louis Cruz, who works for a trucking company at the New Orleans Port Authority in various capacities.

Writing for Joan Carroll Cruz is the fulfillment of a long unexpressed drive for creative self-expression. Having already tried her hand at painting and fine needle-work, in an unsuccessful attempt to satisfy her creative urge, she was about to embark upon volunteer work when the possibility of writing a book occurred to her. Once solidly into it, she discovered she had found her medium and now plans to stay with it for some years to come.

Themes for her prose works are all religious, as is the background for her novels, into which she weaves a definite moral lesson. Fiction without a moral to it is a waste of time, she comments. Her novels are all written without any of the suggestiveness or blatant openness so typical of popular writing today. She maintains, a book does not need this, and she has solidly proved her point.

How can one begin to explain what motivated her to compile and record such unusual subjects as the death, burial, exhumation and condition of the preserved bodies of Saintstopics that, to say the least, would at first appear of morbid and macabre interest but that eventually proved to be stimulating and fraught with mystery? First impulse would claim an inability to explain my attraction for this unusual matter, so far removed from my immediate preoccupations, but I must credit a long-standing interest in the Saints, plus the reading of countless biographies, as my introduction, however subliminally, to this subject.

I can recall being greatly impressed on first learning of that great phenomenon of our day, the perfectly preserved and bleeding body of Saint Charbel Makhlouf, but I lay the origins of this book to a sketch that appeared in a Catholic publication that outlined a reclining figure in a glass reliquary. The caption identified the enclosed form as the incorrupt body of St. Francis of Geronimo, a declaration that subsequent research revealed was completely incorrect. Although inaccurate, the sketch of this Saint, who was previously unknown to me, stimulated my curiosity regarding the number of Saintly preservations in existence, and my interest in this entire subject was immediately kindled.

My preliminary research was abandoned for a year when I was overcome by a feeling of complete inadequacy in the face of so extensive and phenomenal a topic. However, when research was resumed, so many errors and false impressions concerning these preservations were uncovered that a housewifely compulsion for order was aroused, which compelled me once again to undertake, and this time to finish, the compilation of this book.

Initial research involved correspondence with the Library of the Catholic University of America and the Bollandist Jesuits of Brussels. For over 300 years this order of Jesuit scholars has been reviewing and rewriting the lives of the Saints based on documents contemporary to their times. Their work has thus far been published in 68 volumes and is entitled the Acta Sanctorum a work officially accepted as the most accurate record of the Saints. Both contacts revealed that, not only were there no estimates or compilations of these relics, but also there was no research material available, except for Father Herbert Thurston, S.J.s The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism , which contains one lengthy and extremely interesting chapter on the incorruption of the Saints. This book, unfortunately out of print, also explores other topics, such as levitations, stigmatizations, blood prodigies, mystical fasts and other subjects that provide very interesting reading.

Having secured with some difficulty a copy of this excellent work, my next steps were made in the direction of four of New Orleans Catholic university libraries, as well as a number of public libraries. During my visits to these treasuries of information, literally several hundred biographies of Saints were scanned to obtain as many names of the incorruptibles as possible. In order to avail myself of other sources, my next field of exploration was the 14 volumes of the New Catholic Encyclopedia , in which every entry of Saints, blesseds and venerables was read for possible mention of their incorruption. I likewise checked, with rewarding results, a number of anthologies, particularly Butlers Complete Lives of the Saints (1956 edition).