Incorruption is a report about a particular corpse at a particular hour. It is not the resurrection, which the Church preaches of Christ and expects for everyone. It is not a proof of canonization. Many Saints are dust. A few bodies that lasted belong to people who were never raised to the altars. When a Catholic hears, in a finding like Cuthbert’s or Bernadette’s, an echo of the psalm — “neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption” (Psalm 16:10) — she is hearing a hint, not a definition. The psalm, in the Church’s reading, is about Christ first (Acts 2:27).
The practical question is what the glass is hiding. After the third exhumation of Bernadette Soubirous at Nevers, a thin wax covering was laid over the face and the hands so that the body could be shown. The reports of 1909, 1919, and 1925 describe what was under that covering. Pope Pius X, opened in 1944, is shown in St. Peter’s under a silver mask; the photographs of the exhumation are not the face in the basilica. Saint Vincent de Paul is bones in a silver effigy, and a heart kept apart. Saint Anthony’s body had gone to dust by 1263; Bonaventure and the friars kept the tongue. Saint Clare of Assisi, found in 1850, is a skeleton in the habit, the face a later mask. Saint Catherine of Bologna sits upright in a chair at Corpus Domini, the face darkened, the posture chosen by the sisters centuries ago. Treating those six as one phenomenon is how the file goes false.
Saint Carlo Acutis is not on this list. His body lies at Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, and the skin you see has been treated for exposition. The Church canonized him for a life and for two healings. The Church did not claim that leukemia left an incorrupt corpse. The general teaching on relics — Trent, the Code of Canon Law, the difference between a bone and a wonder — is kept in one place, the relics section, and is not copied under every name below. Each name has its own exhumation.
