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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1m

And that’s not even the end of pope-related weird news today, because it’s also the 37th anniversary of Ian Paisley denouncing John Paul II as the Antichrist in the European Parliament and being ejected by a Habsburg crown prince who is alleged to have punched him...

Odd this day

11 October 1988

mulberryhall.medium.com

Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 6m

Thank you! I mean, pretty disgusting, too, but thank you

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 7m

Yes, I'm a fan of that bit

Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 42m

Splendid footnote (the ear detail in particular, obviously):

Horace Dorrington @mrtrellis.bsky.social · 51m

Similarly Mao Zedong's head inflated like a balloon and one of his ears fell off and the Vietnamese embalmers who had done Ho Chi Minh had to brought in to patch up the mess the Chinese had made.

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 43m

Oh, splendid, thank you. Will look into that for a future thread

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 44m

Thank you!

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 55m

Ooh, no. Don’t retweet that. It’s horrid

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 56m

It only remains for me to observe: Yes, it *is* a good thing the rest of the Catholic church’s history is so unblemished, isn’t it…?

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 57m

Anyway, back to the main point. After final absolution, Pius went into a triple coffin (oak, lead and cypress), which, by that stage, would have been as much necessary as it was ceremonial, presumably

Anyway, I’ve finished now, which is – appropriately, perhaps, given our subject – a blessing

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 58m

The words that stand out most in that article are ‘timid’ and ‘cautious’, suggesting a man sticking to neutrality out of fear, rather than any strong conviction. Basically: it’s complicated. In any question of history, politics, or pretty much any human activity, simple answers are not to be trusted

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 59m

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

A 2022 book, David Kertzer’s The Pope at War, qualifies this somewhat by suggesting that “the lives the Vatican worked hardest to save were Jews who had converted to Catholicism or were children of Catholic-Jewish ‘mixed marriages’”

Vatican's Pius XII archives begin to shed light on WWII pope

The first scholarship is beginning to emerge about the World War II-era Pope Pius XII, two years after the Vatican opened its archives.

apnews.com

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

Still, one of the most popular questions about Pius XII is not about this, but: was he a Nazi? He was, certainly, the man about whom John Cornwell wrote a book with the uncompromising title Hitler’s Pope, but his defenders refute this, saying he “worked quietly behind the scenes to save lives”

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

What is perhaps most remarkable about this story, is that, just 20 years later (i.e. within living memory of Pius XII, surely), Pope Paul VI was “only lightly embalmed”, and fans had to be installed to waft away the odours which emanated forth from him. Matters have changed since

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi (and an associate) re-embalmed him overnight, but when he went on display the next day, he was “emerald green” and the Pontifical Swiss Guards standing sentry had to be rotated every 15 minutes to stop them fainting or being ‘taken ill’

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

Basically, however pungent the fluids which had been sprinkled on the old boy, they were as nothing to the acrid substances being generated inside what was left of him. As he was carried in a procession to the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, Pope Pius XII burst open

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

(Yes, this is a lot of detail, isn’t it? I’d say I was sorry, but you may be understandably sceptical by now.) Anyway, all this was taking place inside the mortal remains of Pius XII, even as his immortal soul was being received in heaven. Or something

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

We are, of course, full of and covered with bacteria, not least in our gastrointestinal tracts. After death, these escape, and begin to feed, breaking down our soft tissues in the process known as putrefaction, which is as lovely as it sounds

Putrefaction is associated with a marked shift from aerobic bacterial species, which require oxygen to grow, to anaerobic ones, which do not. These then feed on the body’s tissues, fermenting the sugars in them to produce gaseous by-products such as methane, hydrogen sulphide and ammonia, which accumulate within the body, inflating (or ‘bloating’) the abdomen and sometimes other body parts.

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

As you’ve probably gathered by now, leaving someone’s innards in leads to... unpleasantness. The first stage of what happens is autolysis, also known by the delightful term self-digestion, in which “Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down”

What happens to our bodies after we die

The breakdown of our bodies after death can be fascinating – if you dare to delve into the details. Mo Costandi investigates.

www.bbc.com

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

It had, as a bonus, supposedly been used on “early Christians, including Charlemagne”, and was completed by the highly authentic 9th century technique of wrapping a cellophane sheet round him. What it did not involve was removing the internal organs or introducing any formaldehyde into the corpse

The Man Who Made the Pope Explode

Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi was a less-than-trustworthy personal physician.

web.archive.org

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

A 1998 book, Modern Mummies — The Preservation of the Human Body in the Twentieth Century, by Christine Quigley, says: “During the treatment, which took three and a half hours, pungent fluids were sprinkled on the Pope’s clothing and volatile resins were absorbed through the skin”

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

But, what with Pius being a fan, this clearly brilliant man (“an oculist with rather limited training as a medical internist”, and with “an extensive history of medical incompetence and outright quackery that would be a malpractice attorney’s dream”) was chosen to embalm the pope

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

Thank you. I do like to make an effort there

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

Galeazzi-Lisi also took photos of Pius on his deathbed which he sold to Paris Match – and got an Italian news agency to pay him to tell them first, via a secret signal, when the pontiff had breathed his last. Unfortunately, the signal was opening a window, and the room was full of people

By coincidence, one of the prelates waiting around for the pope’s death grew hot and threw the window in question, which was usually shut, open. As a result, three Italian newspapers, taking their cue from what they thought was the prearranged signal, ran black-edged special editions proclaiming the death of Pius XII on October 8, a full day before he actually died. When officials at the Vatican denied news of the death, the editions had to be recalled.

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Coates is Odd This Day @oddthisday.bsky.social · 1h

This doctor, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, was trusted by Pius, but had failed to impress anyone else in the Vatican. Indeed, according to John-Peter Pham’s book Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession, such was his

infamy for incompetence that, on the occasion of Pope Pius XII’s death in 1958, the assembled dignitaries did not credit his pronouncement that the pontiff had breathed his last. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani stepped forward and took the stethoscope from the physician. Having verified for himself that the end had come, the irascible head of the Holy Office then communicated the confirmation with a nod to the other prelates present.

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