Digging up a body is hard work, so they took it slow. It had been four years since their beloved foundress’s death, and the Benedictine sisters of Mary, Queen of the Apostles needed to retrieve her remains from the graveyard. They would place her bones beneath the altar of St. Joseph in the beautiful new church at their Gower, Missouri, abbey.
It was April 28, 2023, when they cleared away the last of the mud. The coffin had shifted, a long crack ran down the top, and water puddled beneath. Mother Abbess Cecilia Snell took a deep breath and angled her flashlight’s beam under the pried-up lid, expecting to see either an unrecognizable mess or a pile of bones.
Instead, she saw the distinct shape of a sock-clad foot. She leaned closer to be sure. Then she screamed.
It was a scream of pure joy, not horror. Their hope, so precious they had scarcely dared voice it, had been realized. Sister Mary Wilhelmina Lancaster of the Most Holy Rosary—a tiny, ninety-five-year-old Black woman with a feisty sense of humor—looked just as she had four years earlier. A little dustier, of course, with patches of mold. But her body—not embalmed, just buried in a simple wood coffin with no metal liner—was intact.
Mother Abbess Cecilia Snell took a deep breath and angled her flashlight’s beam under the pried-up lid, expecting to see either an unrecognizable mess or a pile of bones.
A skim of mold covered Sister Wilhelmina’s face, but as one of the sisters whispered excitedly, “Mold doesn’t grow on a skeleton.” Beneath the blackish green fuzz, they could make out their foundress’s familiar features. She even had her eyebrows and eyelashes, Sister Scholastica murmured later, and when they pinched her big toe, “it felt like a real live toe. It was squishy.” As for the habit she had so loved wearing—her previous order had abandoned the full habit and, she felt, lowered their standards—“there was not a thread out of place.” Even the white wimple and thin veil were undamaged.
The linen strap the sisters had used to keep her mouth closed had disintegrated, though, as had the coffin lining. “It was almost like the signs of her death were gone,” remarked Sister Scholastica, “and what spoke of her life was intact.”
• • •
Energy swirled around the abbey, pulling reporters and moviemakers into its vortex and drawing thousands of visitors from all over the country. The nuns turned an alfalfa field into a parking lot and hurriedly handed out knee-length skirts and veils to women unschooled in modesty. Soon members of the Knights of Columbus showed up to direct traffic so at least some of the sisters could return to their cloister and the rhythm of familiar tasks.
Around Sister’s body, though, the world was no longer mundane. In wonderment, visitors stretched out hesitant hands, eager to touch the body of a saint. Later, the bishop would scold the sisters and their guests: “Visitors should not touch or venerate her body, or treat them as relics.” Too late. Anna Keane messages me that she anointed her son-in-law, who was very ill, with “coffin dirt” from Sister Wilhelmina’s grave. “He got better the next day. Was a miracle.”
And who does not need a miracle?
Everybody wanted a piece of Sister Wilhelmina. Not a relic; those days are over. But they wanted to touch her, know her, maybe leave with a CD of the sisters’ music or a copy of the biography that was hastily whipped up. Even people who held religion at arm’s length read the national news stories, hungry for awe.
Those who believed took Sister Wilhelmina’s incorruptibility as a sign of sainthood and a reminder of heaven, because as a saint she would have been ushered through those pearly gates with no delay. For the faithful, incorruptibility meant that holiness was protective, and that God was a personal, powerful, sweetly meddlesome entity who periodically conferred favor.
For the sisters of her order, the sight of Sister Wilhelmina still clad in full-length black must have felt like a vindication. She had founded their order to restore respect for traditional Catholicism, in which nuns wore full habits and not polyester separates. If she were canonized as a saint, that would elevate not only their order but the traditional Catholicism for which it stands. And for Black Catholics who remembered the mid-century apartheid in their faith, a halo around Sister Wilhelmina’s wise old head would be, if not reparation, at least validation.
Those who believed took Sister Wilhelmina’s incorruptibility as a sign of sainthood and a reminder of heaven, because as a saint she would have been ushered through those pearly gates with no delay. For the faithful, incorruptibility meant that holiness was protective, and that God was a personal, powerful, sweetly meddlesome entity who periodically conferred favor.
What draws me is none of that. I am intrigued by the concept of incorruptibility—and how rare it is. Empires crumble, and our planet is ruled by entropy. What politician or CEO has the moral strength to fight the demons of greed and ambition? Catholicism has the most specific definition, though: the incorruptibles are those so holy, their bodies do not decompose after death.
The Incorruptibles. They sound like superheroes, soaring above our limits.
• • •
Because the bottom of the coffin was soggy and unstable, the sisters gently laid their foundress on a table in the central aisle of the abbey church. One of the first visitors was lawyer, podcaster, and filmmaker Royce Hood, whose sister-in-law lives nearby and had texted the news. Years earlier, when Hood’s wife learned that the baby she was carrying would soon die, she began listening to the music of these Benedictine Sisters every night. They were becoming well-known—their first two albums of recorded chants and hymns had topped the classical traditional Billboard charts, and they were the first nuns ever named Billboard Artist of the Year. Mainly, though, their music brought her peace, Hood says, and she hoped it would bring their child peace, too. “She wanted him to know the sound of heaven.”
After one look at Sister Wilhelmina, Hood knew he wanted to tell her story. First, who she was as a person, and then, the mystery of her incorruptibility. He started documenting everything he could, as quickly as he could. “The story got out,” he explains, “and busloads of people came from all over the country.” The abbey was already a place of peace and beauty. “You add Sister Wilhelmina, and you add this divine mystery, whether you’re a believer or not. Even those hostile to the church were reverent. How could you not be?”
Sister Wilhelmina’s incorruptibility is, he believes, partly an assurance of eternal life and “partly a message from God.” But messages from God must be decoded. “Is incorruptibility God’s stamp of approval on the way someone lived their life?” Hood suggests. He finds significance in Sister Wilhelmina’s humility, her cheerful willingness, as foundress, to do the most lowly tasks. “The devil can turn things upside down and disorder them,” he says. “But the one thing he is not able to do is be humble.”
• • •
She was born Mary Elizabeth Lancaster in St. Louis, Missouri. The oldest girl in a family of five children, she grew up in the historic Ville neighborhood, where one of the boys her age was mischievous future rocker Chuck Berry. Cut from a different cloth, Mary Elizabeth entered the convent when she was sixteen.
Round-faced, bespectacled, and bubbling with laughter, she spent fifty years as an Oblate Sister of Providence, a member of the nation’s first Black religious order. It had been established for Black women who felt called to religious life at a time when integration struck many White Catholics as inconceivable.
In 1995, after the Oblate Sisters tossed aside their heavy wool habits and many of the time-honored customs that went with them, Sister Wilhelmina left to found what became the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles.
How must the other sisters feel now, remembering times their shoulder pressed against Sister Wilhelmina’s as they knelt, or their hand brushed hers while harvesting garlic, and seeing those very hands unearthed? Her sisters did not have to reckon with her dissolution. They saw her as they remembered her, down to the Hanes socks and brown scapular. Her physical wholeness assured them that she was indeed extraordinary, imbued with holiness, her body readier than most for resurrection.
Round-faced, bespectacled, and bubbling with laughter, Sister Wilhelmina spent fifty years as an Oblate Sister of Providence, a member of the nation’s first Black religious order. It had been established for Black women who felt called to religious life at a time when integration struck many White Catholics as inconceivable.
I want to talk to them—the quiet ones, not those in charge. But Sister Misericordia writes back, kindly but firm: “We think it would be best if we declined any interviews at this time, as we are still limiting publicity.”
Even if one of the sisters is irrepressible, a renegade bursting to tell her piece of the story, I cannot reach her. Cloister is a fortress, and the silence that is one of Catholicism’s strengths also makes possible the secrecy that is its greatest weakness.
• • •
Bodies typically start decaying in a matter of days. First comes autolysis, which I wish had not been defined as “self-digestion.” Bile floods the body, staining it a yellowish green. Stomach enzymes spill, and bacteria help liquefy the organs, releasing foul gases that bloat the corpse. Tissues turn to watery mush. Skin blisters and slips; hair and nails fall off. Blood pools, and its vessels collapse, then dissolve and leak iron, turning the body brown as it begins to rot.
Even if Sister Wilhelmina’s body had been embalmed, the effects would not have lasted through the swelter of a Missouri summer. Morticians do all that draining and injecting, plumping and painting, just for our final goodbyes.
When you enter the abbey church, you can peer through the archways and see Sister Wilhelmina, resting in a glass-fronted cabinet beneath the side altar dedicated to St. Joseph. Her body has been glazed with wax—nothing that would actively prevent decomposition but enough to protect the skin from external forces, the way we might use a sunscreen.
It is good that I am not a nun of their order, because I would be tempted to also sneak a few freezer coils beneath her. After such a glorious discovery, who could bear to think her flesh might begin to melt, and with it her power to persuade? I suppose that is the point, though: trusting that it will not. Me of little faith.
• • •
The exhumed body of Sister Mary Wilhelmina Lancaster, in repose at the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus in Gower, Missouri. (Courtesy of Tracy Kaiser Kush)
One of the early visitors, Stephanie Lynn Pacheco, has wondered why God would preserve the bodies of some saints and not others. “I believe God preserves them because they are what’s needed at that time,” she concludes, explaining that Sister Wilhelmina honored the traditions of the past—she fired off an outraged letter to the pope when he allowed altar girls—and she died “in the midst of this crisis in the church, when the hierarchy is trying to get rid of the Latin Mass.”
For another early visitor, Lori Rosebrough, the miracle was a gift from God to strengthen people’s faith—or to give faith to disbelievers, like some of Rosebrough’s family members. She says this has given them pause: “For her body to resist decomposition, it could only be divine intervention,” she believes. “I think God wants to reassure us that He is real and Heaven is real.”
When you enter the abbey church, you can peer through the archways and see Sister Wilhelmina, resting in a glass-fronted cabinet beneath the side altar dedicated to St. Joseph. Her body has been glazed with wax—nothing that would actively prevent decomposition but enough to protect the skin from external forces, the way we might use a sunscreen.
For me, there is neither message nor reassurance in Sister Wilhelmina’s body. Something has interrupted the natural cycle, which feels more regrettable than joyous. Besides, that inimitable personality—the woman who spelled out her name to explain that she had a hell of a will and she means it—is not behind that glass. If her eerie intactness were a wink from some divine being, then the world would be crammed with pristine bodies, for there are many saints among us, whether canon lawyers pronounce them so or not.
• • •
In cases of possible incorruptibility, the body must be inspected and relics taken. Bits of flesh or bone are then sealed with wax and sent to Rome. If church authorities deem the incorruptibility valid, the body can then be displayed for veneration. Once devotion to Sister Wilhelmina has been well established, her cause for canonization (essentially, an application for someone to be considered a saint) may be introduced. But miracles must be found. Incorruptibility once counted, but it carries less weight than it used to.
I do not venerate dead bodies. I like the idea that they are scavenged or rotted into fertilizer. Nothing is sadder than a body whose spirit has flown. But visitors to Sister Wilhelmina feel no aversion, no sense of a hollow shell. “With the wax, she does kind of look like a statue,” Pacheco says, “but she looks peaceful. It never felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a dead body.’ I felt an instant connection to her, an overwhelming sense of her presence.
“Some of my friends could smell roses,” she continues, “and my husband said, ‘When I put my hand on her leg and kind of squeezed it, it felt fleshy.’ To me she kind of felt stiff. So many people have these different graces from God that they experienced.”
Different graces: a lovely way to account for the inconsistencies of perception and belief. And she is right: we all pull something different from every experience. Who am I to doubt? Tracy Kaiser Kush smelled that scent, too. She says it is hard to describe: “sweet but not very strong. Pleasant.” She, too, came early, before the rules were imposed. “The first place I touched, of course I went right to her heart,” she says. “Then I kissed her cheek. It just felt like I was kissing somebody who was sleeping.” Before leaving, Kush walked over to the sisters’ small cemetery and took some of the dirt that had touched Sister’s coffin, lucky to be there before it was rationed to one teaspoon per person.
“I know people who have used the dirt and gotten some healings,” she says. “So to me, it’s like a relic.” She also cherishes a cloth from Medjugorje that she rubbed on Sister’s lips. A town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Medjugorje has been an unofficial place of Catholic pilgrimage since the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared there in 1981. Kush met her future husband there; they were married there; they later returned with their children. What a powerful blend of belief and meaningful coincidence, I think, with all her later happiness bearing witness…. But she surprises me by saying that her husband is ill—she mentions a few possible diagnostic labels, then says that really, she knows, it is the Evil One, attacking her through him. She feels sure the devil is trying to break her faith, “and any way he can attack a marriage, he’ll do it.” She is hoping to absorb some of Sister Wilhelmina’s saintly joy.
Before leaving, Tracy Kaisier Kush touched Sister’s coffin, lucky to be there before it was rationed to one teaspoon per person.
I find myself saying, “I’ll pray for you”—me, who does not believe in petitionary prayer, finds it too much like a list for Santa. Or is it that I do not humble myself? All I know is, Tracy is suffering, and “pray for you” is a language we share, and I am helpless to do anything else. Am I insincere to speak easily of prayer and miracles when I doubt them? Is it vile to ask these women for experiences they hold close to their hearts when I am such a skeptic? A curious one, though, willing to find meaning of all kinds.
• • •
The church at Our Lady of Ephesus Abbey tucks into a hillside, and the sun’s rays set its creamy white Kansas limestone aglow. At the 2018 consecration, Sister Wilhelmina watched the bishop sprinkle the exterior walls with holy water three times, intending to purify the stone and prevent demons from approaching. Then he mixed water, wine, salt, and ashes to sprinkle on the interior walls and altar. The ashes symbolized death; the salt, incorruptibility.
Swim in a warm ocean, and the saltwater’s buoyancy will cancel gravity. Breathe a salty mist, and it will clean your airways. Salt can be left uncovered and pinched from a salt pig by a good cook, because it is microbial; no bacteria would dare come close.
Ash is dissolution, the residue of an extinguished fire. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, priests intone every year at the start of Lent.
Sister Wilhelmina did not turn to ash. What are we to make of this?
• • •
Over the centuries, doubters have accused the church of sloshing formaldehyde around in dark of night or magicking up a seemingly preserved corpse. But the first incorruptible saint was Saint Cecilia, and she died in 230 CE, about 1,600 years before formaldehyde was discovered.
Biochemical properties of soil, climate, or the flesh itself are likelier causes. For now, there is no precise explanation for how intact Sister Wilhelmina’s body is. And how her habit sit four years underground and, like some ad for a miracle laundry detergent, come out looking fresh?
Some visitors thought Sister’s body was stiff, but many marveled at how flexible it was, maybe not realizing that all bodies soften again as soon as rigor mortis subsides.
Wool contains a keratin protein naturally resistant to fungi and bacteria. The white wimple, though, is cotton, which is weakened by fungus and would quickly disintegrate if it soaked up the acids and toxins a dead body releases. So unless the sisters are trained morticians and worked by candlelight to fake a saint, her condition still begs for explanation.
In the secular world, theories pop like corn. Natural mummification? That would hinge on her body fat, her diet, how dry and hot the surroundings were, how airtight the coffin was. But Gower is not a desert, and that simple wood coffin let in plenty of moisture.
Some visitors thought Sister’s body was stiff, but many marveled at how flexible it was, maybe not realizing that all bodies soften again as soon as rigor mortis subsides. I turn to Dr. Mary Case, longtime chief medical examiner for St. Louis and surrounding counties and professor emerita of forensic pathology at Saint Louis University.
“There is a tremendous overlay of religion here and wanting to believe that some miraculous thing has occurred,” she remarks, having read up on Sister Wilhelmina. “In certain cases, if a body is well embalmed, the preservation is quite remarkable.” Ah, but she was not embalmed. Still, Case says, “there are occasions when bodies do stay pretty well preserved—they are not perfect but sort of mummified. So I don’t make anything out of the nun being in such a state for four years.”
I nod. This is what I figured. It feels realistic—and a little flat. Science debunks a dream so succinctly.
• • •
Why, I wonder, would we think of our natural, (usually) inevitable disintegration as “corruption,” a word that suggests dishonesty or debasement? Are we that afraid of nature? Clearly, it confuses us. Over the years, nature has been primeval, sublime, threatening, needing to be overpowered or walled out. We speak coyly of “the call of nature” and mean we need to shit. We use “au naturel” to mean buck naked. Both are states we are ashamed of. At its capitalized best, “Nature” is soaked in euphemism and romance; we swing it around like incense whenever tech scares us.
Being human is not unnatural. What made us forget that? Extending our power, first with machines, then with implants and devices?
We were thoroughly natural beings before we braided tech into our brains, bodies, and surroundings. Now we define nature as our opposite: wild, pristine, untouched by our species. The last bit of the world that we have not trampled, stolen, sullied, or bent to our will. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “nature” as the physical world “opposed to humans or human creations”—but a group of lawyers in the U.K. are pushing to change that. “We are a part of Nature, not apart from it,” they insist. So far, they have persuaded the OED to remove the label “obsolete” from a second definition: “the whole natural world, including human beings.”
Being human is not unnatural. What made us forget that? Extending our power, first with machines, then with implants and devices? Living violently, stealing the future of other species and the rocks and trees we saw only as “resources”? Insulating ourselves from sunlight, cold breezes, and fresh air?
No, it happened much earlier, when Christianity gave us dominion over nature instead of honoring our participation in nature. Our “animal” desires became sins. Natural appetites were restricted and redirected.
Was it a coincidence that Christianity also promised we would never die?
• • •
Now that Hood has finished the first part of his docudrama, he is looking for a young Sister Wilhelmina, an actor worthy of the role, to do the reenactments. “My goal,” he says, “is that people will be so inspired, they will walk out of there wanting to be incorruptible. To live as though they are going to be saints.”
Who could discourage that? If believing that you have touched a saint lightens your heart, steels your resolve, and strengthens your faith in something greater than your silly little self, is there harm in it?
The part of me soaked in rational skepticism wants to yell, “Yes! Wishful thinking is dangerous!” The little girl in me who grew up Catholic thinks we need as many saints as possible to heal this world. If the holiness comes as humility and does not judge or turn sanctimonious and superstitious, it should be welcomed in any form for any reason. Our response is what needs to be incorruptible.
Roman Catholicism has always blended wealth and vows of poverty, hierarchical power and foot-washing humility, gilded treasures and earthen vessels. Its energy swirls in the liminal place where life and death meet. It is a faith marked by paradox, and Sister Wilhelmina, dead but lifelike, only furthers that tradition.
Vocations are plummeting across the country, but even before her body was uncovered, Sister Wilhelmina’s order was growing. Sweet-faced young women show up every year, eager, in this time of chaos and uncertainty, to embrace discipline and calm. The order is building an $18 million abbey in southern Missouri, starting another foundation in Evansville, Indiana, and considering one in England.
Their motherhouse in Gower is an interesting place. Humble—sewing exquisite vestments for the priests who hold all the power, farming the earth, choking back arrogant or irritated words to keep the rule of silence. Yet glorious, too—the abbess with a coat of arms and a Gothic crozier; the antique French silver cross and the gold cross studded with amethysts and diamonds, both housing relics of saints. Roman Catholicism has always blended wealth and vows of poverty, hierarchical power and foot-washing humility, gilded treasures, and earthen vessels. Its energy swirls in the liminal place where life and death meet. It is a faith marked by paradox, and Sister Wilhelmina, dead but lifelike, only furthers that tradition.
• • •
Why the joy? Why do we not worry about Sister Wilhelmina, that nature has abandoned her? You would think that in a world where, as Einstein forced us to admit, the only constant is change, we would recoil from what is old and static. Instead, we are thrilled when something endures—a fly caught in amber, an ancient temple, a lifelong friendship. A body.
Did Sister Wilhelmina expect to be incorruptible? Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov did. A Russian Buddhist lama who died in 1927, he asked his fellow monks to exhume him in thirty years. They found his body remarkably intact. It was reburied in a coffin packed with salt (aha, you say, as did I) and exhumed again in 2002. Scientists said the salt could not be entirely responsible. The prevailing theory was that he “suffered from a defect in the gene that hastens the decomposition of the body’s cellular structure after death.”
We were designed to fall apart.
• • •
It starts with double vision. Which, being a man born in 1964, my husband does not mention for months. Then comes the muscle weakness, a limb suddenly changing its mind in the middle of a purpose. That he mentions, idly tacking on the vision problem. Puzzled by the odd pairing of symptoms, I google well into the night. The only match is a rare neuromuscular disease I have never heard of: myasthenia gravis. A weight hung on its very name.
“It’s not ‘gravis’ anymore,” his swiftly found neurologist assures us. The disease can be managed. A few months after Andrew begins taking the prescribed drugs, his doubled vision converges to normal again. The abrupt muscle weakness and crushing fatigue remain, though, and we are not used to their constraints. Until now, I sat back like a Southern belle while he carried anything heavy. But when we brought our seventy-pound dog home with emergency stitches and a cone of shame, Andrew tried to lift him out of the car. The next thing I heard was an anguished yell. The dog—forbidden even to go for walks for ten days—streaked past at 100 miles an hour, leaving my husband sprawled on the concrete floor of the garage, a goose egg already rising on his knee, body and ego both badly bruised.
Did Sister Wilhelmina expect to be incorruptible? Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov did. A Russian Buddhist lama who died in 1927, he asked his fellow monks to exhume him in thirty years. They found his body remarkably intact. It was reburied in a coffin packed with salt (aha, you say, as did I) and exhumed again in 2002.
When myasthenia struck, Andrew had just lost twenty pounds to ward off diabetes. He was the strongest, leanest, and fittest he had ever been. Now he has lost another twenty pounds with the medicine, which kills appetite and gushes water and waste from the body. The diabetes is back because of the steroids. There are days when climbing the stairs of our house requires gearing up, a clenched jaw, and a minute to recover. Gravity’s force has increased tenfold, and it is pulling him down.
The exhumed body of Sister Mary Wilhelmina Lancaster, in repose at the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus in Gower, Missouri. (Courtesy of Tracy Kaiser Kush)
Many of our friends say they know someone with myasthenia gravis. How can this be, if it is so rare? Suspicious, I check. Sure enough, the incidence of autoimmune diseases of all kinds is rising. Worse, they are now affecting young people, too. On a Facebook support group page, I read heartwrenching posts from the mothers of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds.
I can find no good explanation. AI can find no good explanation. The word that recurs most often is “pollution,” so I research one small piece of that: forever chemicals, the roughly 10,000 proprietary compounds that work the mundane miracles of nonstaining carpet, nonstick pots, and Scotchgarded upholstery. These chemicals have one of the strongest known bonds, and they do not break down in the environment—or in our drinking water, or in our bodies. They are the worst kind of incorruptible.
• • •
Somewhere between one hundred and two hundred incorruptibles have been recognized by the Catholic church. St. Francis Xavier. Saint Catherine Labouré. Saint John Vianney. Saint Rita of Cascia, patron of heartbroken women. Saint Zita, whom I loved as a little girl because when she was distracted from her housework by doing good deeds, angels rescued her burning bread and saved her from her husband’s ire.
What a tug of war there has been over these saints, with limbs seized as relics (Francis Xavier gave his right arm, then his left), and corruption detected later (Saint Bernadette of Lourdes fell from grace). Some are labeled “mostly incorruptible,” which seems akin to being “a little bit pregnant.” Hood murmurs something about sin and forgiveness, then says, “We can only wonder, why did the one hand decompose.”
Do the bodies of rogues and scoundrels always rot, I wonder, or is it just that no one goes back to check?
There are secular puzzles in pathology, too: why did 4,400 brains endure, some for thousands of years, long after other soft tissue had rotted? Archaeologists have found logical reasons for only two-thirds of these brains to endure; the cause for the other third remains a mystery. And though incorruptibility is seen as a Catholic phenomenon, solidly fleshed corpses show up all over the place. In Judaism, a case has been made for Baruch, scribe of Jeremiah, and later Hasidic saints. Jews are not much bothered, though, because they have no hard-and-fast doctrine describing the afterlife. Revered Buddhist monks or spiritual masters have also been found in a remarkably lifelike state years after their death, as have the bodies of several Muslim saints and Hindu yogis and mahasiddhas. But only the Catholic church has woven doctrine around this surprise.
Do the bodies of rogues and scoundrels always rot, I wonder, or is it just that no one goes back to check? We want incorruptibility to be holy. Maybe to feel closer to those we revere, or surer of heaven. Maybe it is tied to our secret wish to live forever. Or it is a cultural legacy, laced with a disdain for our own nature.
Or maybe incorruptibility is a miracle, or a wonder of science. And maybe those are not so different.
