"The tomb was empty!" (no not THAT tomb, another one!) from Ruth Gledhill's blog

While surfing around the Internet, and my favorite blogs, and reading some rather saccharin descriptions of St. Francis (more on that, later), I ran across this blog post that caught my eye, not the least of which was the title, "The tomb was empty," which sounds more like an Eastertide posting than one that would appear in the waning weeks of Pentecost.

~ The Rev. Peter M. Carey

Take a look at Ruth Gledhill's description of the attempt to exhume Cardinal John Henry Newman's remains:

From the London Times 4 October 2008:

The Tomb Was Empty!

On Thursday, having won the battle to exhume Cardinal John Henry Newman's body for its transfer to the Oratory in Birmingham, those paying their respects at the graveside had a bit of a shock. There was no body to exhume, nothing at all. Not a trace of bone, hair, human remains or anything except this plate. It means that he was not buried in the lead coffin that many supposed he had been but a simple wooden affair. It is not apparently unusual for remains to disintegrate totally in this fashion. A few fragments of hair preserved elsewhere will now be placed in a casket for veneration in the Birmingham Oratory, but of course there can be no 'lying in state' for a real body.


Read the rest HERE.