Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, according to one account, is described as “an exemplary wife and mother amid poor and trying circumstances.”[1] This, I think, is an understatement. Her story, briefly, is as follows: Anna Maria was born poor, and though her marriage to Domenico Taigi put her in better financial circumstances, her husband was also known for his “exacting and temperamental” attitude which proved to be a source of continual strain and suffering in their marriage. Anna Maria’s home life was, at first, difficult and mundane. She was not marked by any particular sanctity, nor by any sign of the miraculous (it seems she was an average, worldly Catholic at the beginning of their marriage). However, following an unexpected midlife “reversion,” Anna Maria became deeply convicted by the love of Christ and received a personal call to live a radical life of holiness. Suddenly, in addition to all the normal duties of a wife and mother, she began “undertaking many voluntary penances for the conversion of sinners and welfare of the Church.”[2] Despite the sacrifices required by this supernatural call to perpetual prayer, all while being a mother of four and wife of an incurably irascible husband, Anna Maria submitted herself wholeheartedly to the will of God. He, in turn, blessed her soul so much so that it is said “she was frequently in ecstasy, worked miracles of healing, foretold deaths, [and even] read hearts”—not to mention, a near-constant vision of a mysterious “globe-sun,” visible only to her, that God would use to communicate supernatural knowledge.[3] Stories of her holiness and prophetic gifts began to disseminate, and towards the end of her life, she began attracting the attention of figures such as Napoleon’s mother and even the Pope himself. But as fascinating as the life of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi is, no less captivating is the miracle that was discovered after her death.
Given her extraordinary life on earth, it is no surprise that, following her burial in 1837, pilgrims began flocking to her grave and claims of her miraculous intercession abounded. A request was made for her body to be moved to a location more convenient for pilgrims. Consequently, as recorded in Joan Carroll Cruz’s text, The Incorruptibles,
…eighteen years after the burial of the Blessed, the Cardinal Vicar gave orders for the removal of the casket to the Church of Our Lady of Peace, where it was opened during the night in complete secrecy. Somehow news of the exhumation spread throughout the district and crowds thronged to the church to view the body of the Blessed, which had been found in a state of perfect preservation, fresh as if it had been buried the day before.[4]
Yes, Blessed Anna Maria Taigi—prophetic mystic and dutiful housewife—is considered a member of the Church’s “Incorruptibles:” a mysterious collection of Saints and Blesseds whose bodies, when exhumed, were found to defy the vicissitudes of time and decay, instead remaining supernaturally preserved and often exhibiting a sweet odor.
Given the Church’s predilection for relics, it should come as no surprise that these bodily anomalies are frequently kept on display, serving as perpetual reminders and inspirations for the lay faithful. For those interested, the bodies of the Incorruptibles can be found today encased in glass reliquaries beneath high altars, or tucked away within small devotional chapels across the globe. This includes the body of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, which is located beneath the altar of the Basilica of St. Chrysogonus in Rome.[5] And so, if one were to approach her body today, and kneel before the altar with all piety and holy trepidation, one would find—if one looks very closely—the body of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi… is covered in wax. In fact, one cannot see any of her exposed features at all.
A Corrupt Conundrum
As it turns out, Blessed Anna Maria Taigi is no longer currently incorrupt—the claim is that her miraculous condition lasted only upon the first opening of her grave, but not past the second. Today, her bones (and all that is left of her) are arranged within a waxy-plastic encasing which is designed to imitate the experience of those who first exhumed the body in 1855. And so, for those pilgrims journeying to Rome expecting to venerate an immaculate body of one appearing “merely asleep,” Blessed Anna Maria Taigi proves a serious disappointment. In fact, those same pilgrims might make the same judgment of many, if not all, of the Incorruptibles on display today. The body of St. Cecilia, for instance, is kept within a marble sarcophagus depicting her appearance at death; the bodies of Pope St. Pius V and St. Vincent Pallotti are likewise encased in silver. Some Incorruptibles do have limbs that are actually exposed, but their bodies could hardly be called fresh. They rather look like small persons with dark skin stretched over an emaciated frame and are obviously in a state of decay (for example, St. Catherine of Bologna). Needless to say, it is a little suspicious to keep a supposedly miraculous body hidden away within an encasement—and even more so to find out a supposedly “incorrupt” body is being preserved through very ordinary, non-miraculous, scientific methods (St. Bernadette, for instance). All of this leads the reasonable person to ask: are there any real Incorruptibles at all, or are they nothing more than pious fairytales, the delusions of an overzealous religion lacking proper scientific tools?
The last thing modern Catholics want is to be taken for gullible medievals, naively believing miracles at the expense of hard scientific facts. So, while many of us admit that miracles sometimes do happen, we simultaneously remain very skeptical—keeping in mind how easily we are tricked by wishful thinking. And this is for good reason. For example, upon later scientific investigation by the Church, many rumors of incorrupt bodies have, in fact, been falsified.[6] But on the other hand, there are some examples that are, in the real sense of the term, extraordinary occurrences: as in, they do not in fact follow the ordinary processes of decomposition. Incorruptibility, to the Church, generally means one or more of the following oddities are commonly associated alongside the discovery of a surprisingly preserved corpse: such as, abnormal flexibility for something called a “stiff,” having little to “no” stench at a time when the body should stink, bodily organs that should have putrefied yet have not fully decomposed, claims of the body emitting a sweet scent (called the “odor of sanctity”), or, as in one case, congealed blood mystifyingly liquifying at regular intervals (though the rest of the corpse has decayed).[7] In short: the state of preservation of these particular Incorruptibles is by no means negligible—even if the source or meaning of these strange occurrences (and to what degree they are “incorrupt”) is still ambiguous. That these things happen, is not so much the question. How they happen, or why we should take note of them, is the real quandary. Perhaps these truly are miracles from heaven and we should interpret them as such. Or, perhaps they are only scientific anomalies, a fascinating display of the randomness of chance, meaning nothing in the end.
The good news is, if we are disappointed by the Incorruptibles, it is a disappointment coming from an honest scrutiny. But whatever our final thoughts may be, we modern Catholics are still left with a conundrum: if our own honest investigation of the Incorruptibles leaves us skeptical, how do we make sense of the Church’s affirmation of them? If the tradition has been mistaken about these matters, how ought we reconcile this mistake? Faith and reason, the Church teaches, do not contradict. It follows, then, that either faith is misplaced in this particular instance, or the science is. But the problem with this black and white solution is that, as we have already begun to see, what the Church even means by “incorrupt” is not quite what we would come to expect by the meaning of the term. It doesn’t take a scientist to tell if a body still looks fresh, so at first, it seems all we need is a quick look into the glass sarcophagus and we have our answer. But is it really that simple? After all, it would take a stark idiot or bold-face liar to claim that the decrepit body of St. Paula Frassinetti is “incorrupt,” as the nuns who keep her today insist—if, what is meant by the term is “remaining in a state of little to no decay.” And while it might be easy to relegate some of these miraculous claims to the ancient past, as mere by-products of an age of illiteracy and superstition, the death of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi is quite recent. How is it possible, then, that the Church can take a look at (relatively speaking) the same phenomena we are presented with today and claim the miracle of incorruptibility? Who was or is pulling the fleece over the lay faithful’s eyes? Rather than leap to sweeping conclusions that would deny the lay faithful of generations past or little old nuns today their basic common sense, my suggestion is this: perhaps the reason for this dissonance is because we are not, in fact, perceiving the same things in the first place. Perhaps the Church’s Incorruptibles today have more to reveal about the gaze of modern man than anything else.
Hyperreality and Death
Jean Baudrillard, a postmodern French philosopher from the eighties, describes our present condition as an age of hyperreality. What he means can be somewhat difficult to grasp, and so it is best to begin as he does in his seminal text, Simulacra and Simulation: with a reflection on simulation, which is the first movement toward the age of hyperreality. According to Baudrillard, one of the best allegories of simulation (that is to say, simulation as a mass social experience) is a certain fable by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, “in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly.”[8] In this story, the cartographers’ map reaches the height of perfection as an exact copy, to the point where the image of the map totally covers the entire land of the Empire itself. But eventually, this perfect replica meets the same fate of all material things: it begins to fray and decompose. Little by little, the rotting and fraying map brings about the destruction of itself and the real territory it represents, both of which are now indistinguishable in their mutual ruin. The cartographers, at this point in the narrative, must helplessly witness their creation “fall into ruins… the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil.”[9] In effect, the simulation had become so complete that it began to dominate the reality of the Empire itself; the abstraction had become the real. This meant that, at a certain point, the simulation and the real had become so intertwined that the destruction of the imitation also became the destruction of reality itself. In short: simulation, according to Baudrillard, is when the artificial becomes the real and the imitation becomes identical with the original.
Of course, the Borges fable is an exaggerated allegory. Nonetheless, Baudrillard sees the pattern of simulation increasingly enacted in modern society. Movies, for example, are a simulation because they are an increasingly perfected imitation of reality. It is the attempt to capture the human experience as closely as possible on screen, and so much so, that the desired effect is to become completely absorbed in its pseudo-reality for the duration of the film. But film is not a simulation merely because it imitates reality, but rather because of the way it becomes entangled with it. Just like the map of the cartographers, the simulation of cinema begins to imitate reality so completely that it becomes, in fact, the real. So, consider how movies and TV shows not only imitate human reality, but also influence and create it: what we see on the screen changes the way we behave, what we expect, what we buy. We make judgments about daily reality based on its imitation. But the paradigm example of simulation, though Baudrillard wrote before its time in the eighties, would have to be social media. Today, anyone can create a perfect simulation and record of one’s life through the use of their smartphone and simply upload to Facebook, Instagram, or what have you, where millions upon millions are continually plugging into a social world inundated with countless images and simulations masquerading as the real. Unsurprisingly, this cultural experience of shared simulation causes great stress and anxiety, as people increasingly compare themselves with the “perfect” lives of their friends and family—even while everyone is well aware that these “perfect moments” are merely snippets, exaggerations, or even lies concerning their real existence. The world of social media is a world of simulation: we are all convinced the imitation is the real.
Hyperreality, however, is one step further down the simulation rabbit hole. If “simulation” is when the imitation of reality becomes the real, “hyperreality” could be defined as the moment when the imitation of the imitation becomes the real. As Baudrillard explains,
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.[10]
In other words, the thing being imitated is no longer the original reality itself. What is being imitated is a simulation of reality. Consequently, the map and the territory becomes rather like the question of the chicken and the egg: it is unclear which one came first. What results is a reality at least two times removed—a hyperreal—and we begin to question whether there is an “original” at all (or find the question irrelevant). Once again, social media provides a prime example as we witness its evolution from a world of simulation to a hyperreality. Here—on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, or what have you—the simulation is not merely limited to an imitation of the original, but has rather moved on to imitations of imitations.
Consider, for example, the proliferation of genders across all these platforms: gender identity is no longer limited to expressions of the opposite sex, but openly includes the imitations of exaggerated realities that were never the original—the “hyperfemale” imitation displayed by drag queens, or the construction of androgynous (and even chimerical) figures impossible to achieve without modern technologies (be it cosmetics, costuming, or surgery). Another example would be the number of influencers advocating “lifestyles” that are not merely fake or merely impossible caricatures of life, but are in themselves imitations of simulations. The ideal is no longer a rose-tinted version of one’s own life, but the replication of a pseudo-life popularized by other influencers. Young men and women find themselves imitating an ideal on Instagram that was never a reality in the first place. Hyperreality, then, consists in an alienation from what is real and what is original. Furthermore, this alienation extends beyond the bounds of the glowing screens that accompany us everywhere we go—in fact, hyperreality follows us all the way into death itself.
One of the significant differences between pre- and post-modernity is that life today is no longer marked by an intimate familiarity with death—real death, that is. It is not simply the fact that there is just less death around, thanks to modern medicine. Death, in the end, still comes for us all, and so the main difference is not so much the mitigated risk of death, but that when it does occur, we hardly ever see it. In fact, we hide it and warp it so well that, I think Boudrillard would agree, our experience of the reality of death itself has become hyperreal. The irony is that we are seemingly surrounded by death all the time, with news stories of murders and mass shootings flashing across our screens, or the proliferation of extremely graphic movies and videogames. In an instant, a Netflix show can throw us into another reality, whether we suddenly find ourselves immersed in a raging battle, or standing beneath the fluorescent lights of an autopsy. Our experience with death is commonplace, we see it all the time—but only ever as an imitation, or an imitation of an imitation (we all know those gory films just a little too bloody to claim realism). As such, we have become accustomed to pseudo-death, have numbed ourselves not to violence, but to our imitation of what violence and death must be like.
When it comes to real death, we’d rather not think about it. Instead, we insist on “celebrations of life,” we refuse to use the word “death” around children or even other adults. Many children have never attended a funeral at all—their parents believe they are not ready to see such things. But is hiding death really a good thing? Even the funerals we do attend, I wonder how many of us have seen a “real” dead body—that is, one not covered in makeup, looking pristine and plump as the moment they passed away on the hospital bed. This is not to say that premodern morticians did not also attempt to preserve bodies as best they could before burial, but I wager that keeping a body looking this good for so long—and without smelling—would be considered a miraculous feat. Death, to us, appears very similar to life—it is simply an immobile and static version of it. What we are accustomed to is its hyperreal form: real death is not typically so excessively gory; real death also does not look like perfect bodies we find lying in the coffin. Hyperreality has alienated us from what death actually is, what it smells and looks like, how commonplace and ordinary it is. And this, perhaps, is the point.
From the Corpse to the Cosmos
Given our modern experience of death, it is not clear that the ancient Church and modern man would even perceive the same thing while looking at the same body. For a culture regularly acquainted with the pattern of death, or a people familiar with the look and the smell of a dead body at both its recent passing and a few days past its prime, or a society regularly pressed by the necessity of a timely burial so as to avoid a malodorous funeral—any turn from the ordinary pattern of things would be immediately noticeable. In fact, this was the general notion of what a miracle was in the first place: the Christian and even ancient pagan cosmos was a fundamentally meaningful cosmos, and so the experience of a serious and significant break from the cosmic pattern was obviously interpreted as meaningful in itself (and the more unlikely the occurrence, the more pronounced the portent). In a post-enlightenment world, however, the cosmos is not an expression of meaning, but rather an automated functioning of a machine according to the immutable laws of nature. “Miracle” and “supernatural” take on a new meaning; they are no longer events harmonious with the cosmos but antithetical to it. This is why French theologian Jean-Luc Marion can say that “Miracles were discovered, so to speak, in the seventeenth century, not only among English philosophers like Locke and Hume, but also many in France.”[11] Miracles, according to its popular usage, is a rather modern invention.
Consequently, not only are we approaching the Incorruptibles with a shifted notion of the miraculous, but our modern experience of death has also altered; today it comes wheeled out to us in three thousand dollar coffins, buried beneath pounds of makeup, and sporting a facelift. It is no small wonder our expectations of the Incorrupt are so high or that we apprehend them with such sincere disappointment. God Himself couldn’t make a corpse look so good! Well, I suppose He could, but it is rather out of character for divine communications to come by caricature. Miracles, especially in its ancient sense, are rarely (if ever) flashy or gaudy. They simply do not need to be. For the attentive, for those deeply connected to the reality in which they live, a simple yet clear break from a meaningful pattern is enough to express that something extraordinary is at hand.
But for modern man, paying attention to the cosmos and our place within its patterns is not so straightforward a task. We live in a world where we can control the weather in our own homes, for crying out loud. It is impossible that this degree of habitual control over our physical spaces should have no effect on the way we perceive the rest of the natural and supernatural order. Consequently, one effect of only ever experiencing death in the age of the hyperreal, or of only ever witnessing simulations and imitations of the dead and dying, is that we have become alienated from one of the most basic experiences of human existence. The wisdom past generations would have obtained by simply observing the cycle of life and death (that life always requires the sacrifice of life, that the love of any passing creature requires a spirit of detachment, the inevitability of suffering and necessity of meaning to endure it). While not impossible to perceive in our current age, it is certainly obscured and not fully integrated into the cultural heritage received by men and women today. Instead, much of what we receive—often through TV and netflix—is life once or twice removed, but not life itself. And so, we have developed a new “wisdom” in accordance with our new experience: that perpetual youthfulness can and ought to be attained, that love of any passing thing can and ought to be gratified immediately, that suffering is meaningless and therefore always ought to be alleviated at all costs. This distance from our most basic human experience, the inevitability of death and all its natural consequences, alienates us from our own human nature and the natural order itself. And so, whereas the ancients were reading “the book of nature” in order to understand themselves and their place in the cosmic order, and from there within the supernatural order, we find ourselves gleaning wisdom from simulations on Netflix, or broken snippets on TikTok. How can we even perceive the action of God in our own reality if it is precisely our own reality to which we are blind?
It may be entirely accurate, then, to say that we are so inundated with the hyperreal that we are not even capable of perceiving the anomalies right under our noses. It is a situation rather reminiscent of the words of Christ, who said to his disciples:
To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables: so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.[12]
The Incorruptibles, then, ought not be dismissed as stuffy artifacts belonging to the bygone days of an unscientific Church. Instead, we should interpret them as opportune signs revealing our alienation not only from death, but from the cosmos itself. They reveal our blindness to reality as it is and the absurdity of our own high expectations—not only of the natural, but the supernatural as well.
The body of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi is a far cry from the plumped up, freshened bodies we see at funerals today. Furthermore, whatever state of preservation she was found in upon her first exhumation, it is certainly not the case she still remains an obvious exemplar of angelic preservation—quite the contrary. To most casual observers, then, the Incorruptible Anna Maria Taigi might still prove a disappointing or dubious affair, lacking only a thorough scientific investigation to complete the picture. And yet, this disappointment may only come for those who are not looking for real miracles in the first place. In the final analysis, I would argue that the miraculous has never appeared clothed in the regalia of the hyperreal, but only ever within the folds of the everyday and ordinary patterns of life. “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear”—and for those who have eyes to see, let them see.[13]
Joan Carroll Cruz, The Incorruptibles, (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1977), 264.
Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 265. (Emphasis my own)
Ibdid., 266.
St. Catherine of Siena’s body, for example, is no longer considered incorrupt.
St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Therese of Lisieux, and St. Teresa of Avila are all said to have emitted a sweet scent upon their death. The blood of St. Januarius, kept in a vial out on public display, liquifies inexplicably on certain feast days every year.
Jean Baudrillard, Trans: Sheila Faria Glasier, Simulacra and Simulation, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1.
Ibid., 1.
Ibid., 1.
Kenneth L. Woodward, “We Are Not Yet Christians: An Interview with Jean-Luc Marion,” Commonweal. (Dec 17, 2022). https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/marion-francis-love-god-philosophy-woodward
Mark 4:11-12
Mark 4:9