of the body
of a just man, since it is maintained that the bodies of the
excommunicated do not rot in the earth until the sentence of
excommunication pronounced against them be taken off.

Footnotes:

[509] Concil. Meli. in Can. Nemo. 41, n. 43. D. Thom. iv. distinct.
18, 9. 2, art. 1. quaestiuncula in corpore, &c.

[510] S. Leo canone Commun. 1. a. 4. 9. 2. See also Clemens III. in
Capit. Sacris, 12. de Sepult. Eccl.

[511] Eveillon, traite des Excommunicat. et Manitoires.

[512] D. Thom. in iv. Sentent. dist. 1. qu. 1. art. 3. quaestiunc. 2.
ad. 2.

CHAPTER XXIX.

DO THE EXCOMMUNICATED ROT IN THE GROUND?

It is a very ancient opinion that the bodies of the excommunicated do
not decompose; it appears in the Life of St Libentius, Archbishop of
Bremen, who died on the 4th of January, 1013. That holy prelate having
excommunicated some pirates, one of them died, and was buried in
Norway; at the end of seventy years they found his body entire and
without decay, nor did it fall to dust until after absolution received
from Archbishop Alvaridius.

The modern Greeks, to authorize their schism, and to prove that the
gift of miracles, and the power of binding and unbinding, subsist in
their church even more visibly and more certainly than in the Latin
and Roman church, maintain that amongst themselves the bodies of those
who are excommunicated do not decay, but become swollen
extraordinarily, like drums, and can neither be corrupted nor reduced
to ashes till after they have received absolution from their bishops
or their priests. They relate divers instances of this kind of dead
bodies, found uncorrupted in their graves, and which are afterwards
reduced to ashes as soon as the excommunication is taken off. They do
not deny, however, that the uncorrupted state of a body is sometimes a
mark of sanctity,[513] but they require that a body thus preserved
should exhale a good smell, be white or reddish, and not black,
offensive and swollen.

It is affirmed that persons who have been struck dead by lightning do
not decay, and for that reason the ancients neither burnt them nor
buried them. That is the opinion of the physician Zachias; but Pare,
after Comines, thinks that the reason they are not subject to
corruption is because they are, as it were, embalmed by the sulphur of
the thunderbolt, which serves them instead of salt.

In 1727, they discovered in the vault of an hospital near Quebec the
unimpaired corp