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From Herbert Thurston:
"Father Bobola, born of a noble Polish family, at the time of his death in I657, was 67 years of age. For many years he had been combating by his preaching the propaganda of the Russian schismatics among his Ruthenian countrymen until he came to be known as the Apostle of Pinsk. His success had drawn down upon himself the special hatred of his religious opponents. During the course of an inroad of the Cossacks in 1657, Father Bobola fell into their hands. When he refused to conform to the Russian schism he was most cruelly tortured, being scourged and outraged in ways that cannot here be described. He was partially flayed alive, one hand was almost completely hacked off, splinters of wood were driven in under his nails, his tongue was torn out by the roots, and his face so disfigured with heavy blows that it hardly retained the semblance of humanity. “He bled," said an eye-witness, “like an 0x in the slaughter-house.” It was only after hours of torment, when the butchers had glutted their rage and when no signs of life remained but a convulsive twitching of the muscles, that the victim was finally despatched by a sword blow in the throat. After throwing the body upon a dung-heap, the Cossacks departed, leaving the Catholics free to gather up the mutilated remains, which were eventually conveyed to Pinsk and hastily interred in the vault beneath the Jesuit church in that town.
Forty-four years later, the Rector of the Jesuit College of Pinsk was led by a vision or dream, which he deemed supernatural, to make search for the body of the martyred apostle. It was found eventually, to all appearance in exactly the same state in which it had been committed to the tomb. Apart from the mutilations of the martyrdom it was entire and quite incorrupt; the joints were flexible, the flesh in the less injured parts was resilient to the touch, while the blood with which it was still covered in many places looked as if it was freshly congealed. Other more or less formal inspections of the body took place during the next twenty years, but it was not until 1730 that the final and official examination was carried out under sanction of the Apostolic See. Six ecclesiastics and five medical experts subjected the remains to a close and prolonged scrutiny, and their depositions are still preserved to us. They agreed in declaring that the body, except for the wounds inflicted by the murderers, was entire, that the flesh was soft and flexible, and that its preservation could not be attributed to any natural cause. Although we are not told that the body was cut into, still its mutilated condition and the open wound in the throat would surely have betrayed the presence of adipocere, and this strange condition could hardly have failed to elicit some comment if any great mass of that substance had replaced the muscles and internal organs. Upon this evidence the case was debated at length, both in 1730 and in 1830, by successive Promoters of the Faith and Postulators of the cause,* and in 1835 this preservation of the body was formally accepted by the Congregation of Rites as one of the miracles required for the Beatification. I ought not to omit to state that more than one of the witnesses deposed that the other bodies buried in the same vault with that of Blessed Andrew Bobola were none of them preserved from corruption.
*I have in this instance had the opportunity of reading the arguments and the summary of the evidence in the printed Process of Beatification. It must be confessed that even in 1830 the official advocates for and against seem to be little acquainted with the observed phenomena in the matter of the putrefaction of human remains. The discussions are nevertheless very lengthy. The final reply of the Postulator of the cause occupies fifty folio pages.
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