Exhumed Body of Padre Pio Goes On Display

John Hooper of The Guardian reports from Rome:

Some 15,000 worshippers gathered yesterday at the shrine of the Roman Catholic saint and mystic Padre Pio, as his exhumed body went on display for the first time since his death almost 40 years ago.

More than a million people are expected to file past a transparent casket holding his restored corpse between now and September 2009. Catholic practice allows for the remains of saints to be exhumed, checked for their state of deterioration and exhibited as relics for veneration.
Padre Pio’s body is unusually central to the cult that surrounds him, and exceptionally controversial. For believers the visible evidence of his sanctity was the stigmata - the wounds of Jesus on the cross - that first appeared in 1910.

The article reports that " Padre Pio’s face was covered with a lifelike silicone mask of the type used in wax museums."

Editor’s note: Necromancy (attempting or communicating with the dead) is forbidden in the Bible. The Roman Catholic Church acknowledges this fact, however there is a loophole in the RCC doctrine:

The Church does not deny that, with a special permission of God, the souls of the departed may appear to the living, and even manifest things unknown to the latter…necromancy is held by theologians to be due to the agency of evil spirits, for the means taken are inadequate to produce the expected results.

This timely news piece highlights another facet of Roman Catholic mysticism…the same spirituality that the purpose driven, seeker sensitive and the emergents promote as benign.

Hosea 4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

HT: Christian Research Network