Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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   “The curriculum had already drawn tensions among the county’s religious parents, with some worrying about appropriateness and arguing the material…

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   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

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   The defence of a Christian view never seems to be settled by debate: exchange of facts, reference to historical events.…

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   But …… Rwanda is a safe place: Parliament says so.https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/8/contentsSafety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 S 2 Safety…

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   Religion can survive only on the most unquestionable assumptions. The statements made on Sundays on the BBC as if they…

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THE subject of John Cornwell’s book, Hitler’s Pope, died in Rome on October 11, 1958. Days later, as his corpse lay in waiting before being entombed, it explodes, causing Swiss Guards to faint.

The Anatomy Lab provides the gory details:

As is normally the case with popes, there was to be a large funeral with viewing, requiring the body to be embalmed to preserve it during the viewing process. In accordance with tradition, the papal physician Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi was responsible for the embalming. Known to be an incompetent physician, Galeazzi-Lisi showed himself to be as bad at embalming as he was in normal medical matters and he botched the embalming.

Galeazzi-Lisi was humiliated and was eventually banned from the Vatican forever. Wiki says:

He claimed to have used the same system of oils and resins with which the body of Jesus Christ was preserved … Unlike all popes before him, Pope Pius XII did not want the vital organs removed from his body, demanding that it be kept ‘in the same condition in which God created it’.

The Anatomy Lab added that there was a failure to keep the corpse refrigerated in the unseasonably warm weather.

Inevitably autolysis, plus putrefaction caused by the gut bacteria, were soon generating large amounts of gas inside the body. Over the 4 day course of the viewing and funeral ceremony, the Pope’s chest ‘exploded’ due to build-up of gas in the chest cavity, then the nose and fingers fell off and the body turned a greenish black colour. The smell was so sickening that some guards fainted and guarding could only be made bearable by changing the guard every 15 minutes.

Hat tip: Stephen Harvie

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