St. Paul's Bones

Tradition holds that St. Paul is buried beneath the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, one of the four major (and ancient) basilicas of Rome. More news has come out on the excavations there - that "Vatican technicians entered the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in the dead of night, drilled a small hole in the tomb under the main altar and extracted fragments of what was inside."

Cardinal Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo said introducing a probe into the sarcophagus was an idea approved by Pope Benedict some four years ago.

The cardinal and Santamaria both explained that the slab of marble covering the sarcophagus is marked with circular carvings into which pilgrims once dipped pieces of cloth, which they believed would touch the body of the saint, making them what the cardinal described as "contact relics."

They both explained, however, that those carvings had not penetrated the tomb and that the tiny perforation drilled by Vatican technicians was the only opening.

Cardinal Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo said that the tomb had been "closed and sealed, and had never been opened."

The cardinal said that a complete opening of the tomb in the future had not been ruled out, although there was no concrete plan at the moment to do so. Such a project would be a major operation requiring the approval of the pope, he said. It would entail dismantling the papal altar, extracting the very large sarcophagus and transporting it to a laboratory to be opened and studied.

In a counterpoint, a commentator in the Baltimore Sun wants to know who needs it:

Why do we insist on this stuff? If it's "unanimous and uncontested," what's the point? Next thing you know, we're going to require video and sound recordings from 62 A.D. before we'll believe any of it.

What happened to faith? So much of religion is predicated in a certain amount of blind belief, it surprises me that the Catholic Church felt a need to verify the authenticity of Paul's bones. What does it matter? Thanks to a beheading, the poor man's skull and teeth are located elsewhere. Thank goodness, or Pope Benedict might be telling us that, based on a bit of scientific teeth scraping, we know what Paul last ate.

My first thought when reading the pope's words was that the Catholic Church has a high-tech lab hidden in some catacomb under one of Rome's hills in which scientists will reconstruct the DNA of the Apostle and clone the old saint. Once again Paul will don glorious robes, or perhaps Levi's, and walk the earth among us. Whew, hand that little idea to The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown and let him run with it. I'm already looking forward to seeing Tom Hanks in another sequel.

Spoilsport...