Ed Gein's big mistake

If you or I were to exhume a long-dead body in search of bone fragments for trophies, we would be held up to public obloquy as ghouls or monsters of morbidity. Or so I hear from a friend. One can only get away with grave-robbing if there is a religious connection:

The coffin itself will not only be disinterred, but opened so that 'relics' from Newman's body, which may be bones from his fingers or fragments of cloth from his priestly vestments, may be taken in order to distribute and display in other Catholic churches.

Of course it is no skin off my nose* if the English authorities give a special dispensation to a delegation of god-botherers to desecrate graves as part of a public-relations exercise. Amongst the Brits, however, questions have been asked about the propriety of exhuming and re-interring the late Newman, whose own wishes were quite definite about sharing the grave of his long-time companion in life:

Subsequently, the Cardinal repeated on no fewer than three occasions his firm desire to be buried with his friend. He wrote the following just weeks before his death in the summer of 1890. 'I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St John's grave... I give this as my last, my imperative will.'

Catholic spokesmen insisted "that Newman would have been glad to submit to the wishes of the Vatican in whatever they asked, no matter his previous wishes". Rather than "ventriloquise the dead" [phrase © Christopher Hitchens], the original plan had been to use puppetry of the corpus instead, attaching ropes to the hands and feet of Newman's corpse so it could be manipulated through a jerky interpretative dance of acceptance, to a soundtrack of Spencer Tracy singing "You should see me dance the polka."

Sadly, the supermarionation option was not available due to Newman having become as one with the soil:

the exhumation revealed that Newman had been buried in a wooden coffin and his body had completely decomposed; there were no human remains. The only artefacts retrieved, including an inscription plate, were wooden, brass and cloth.

The resurrection team were not fastidious and made do with a sample of humus in which Newman's DNA intermingled with that of Father St John (plus countless invertebrate, protozoan and prokaryote life-forms).

Newman was nominated as Most Valuable Player basically to flatter and encourage other English persons to follow his career path from the anglican church to the catholic one. However, in a kind of cargo-cult version of science, the process for telling God whom to promote to the upper echelons of Heaven requires an evidentiary basis. In Newman's case this consists of a report that praying to him cured a backache: “The following morning I woke up and the pain was gone”.

Needing another miracle before he can be promoted to sainthood, the Vatican is considering a case involving "severe head injuries suffered in a car accident after invoking Cardinal Newman".

Government Health Warning:
Invocations can Imperil your Health.

There is also debate in England about spending money on the Pope when he visits the UK to perform Newman's beatification. Some feel that he should be afforded all the courtesies of a formal state visit. Others suggest the hospitality of six feet of English soil a standard 3m x 3m x 5m cell.

There is no truth to the claim that Catholics like to commemorate victories over anglicism by building a chapel on the site of each conversion.

* Just as well, since the skin-grafts are still tender since the Extreme Cocktails session at the Old Entomologist last month pushed the boundaries of flammability.