77 saints in this catalogue are reported to have been found undecayed, or to have left behind one part of themselves that was. They are among the most visited bodies in the world and among the worst described.
The usual list runs everything together: the body four physicians examined and the body nobody has opened since 1620, the one found entire and the one that crumbled at the next exhumation, the saint under glass and the wax mask over the saint under glass. This page keeps them apart. The groups are uneven because the evidence is uneven, and the strong cases are only interesting once the weak ones have been moved out of the way.
The Church claims nothing here. Incorruption has never been defined, has never been required for a canonisation, and has never once been accepted as the miracle a cause needs. Bodies are examined during a process to identify and account for the remains, not to prove anything by their condition. Everything below is a report, and the site gives it as one.
Opened, and found entire
Bodies exhumed — usually for a translation of relics or for a canonisation process — and found undecayed, in most cases more than once and before witnesses who wrote it down. This is what the word usually means, and it is the smallest of the claims made in its name.
St. Cecilia
Opened in 1599 during a restoration and found lying on her right side, face to the floor, the three sword-cuts visible at her neck. Stefano Maderno was there and carved the statue that still lies under her altar in the exact posture — which makes it the only sculpture in Rome that is also a piece of forensic evidence.
St. Etheldreda (Audrey) of Ely
Translated by her sister sixteen years after burial and reported entire, with the surgeon's incision healed. Bede records it, which makes this the earliest such account in English.
St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
Found undecayed at the translation of 698, eleven years after his death, and reported so again at later openings while the monks carried him about Northumbria ahead of the Danes. What is at Durham now is bone.
St. Werburgh of Chester
St. Edmund the Martyr
Reported entire, with the neck wound closed, when the shrine was inspected in the Middle Ages. The relics did not survive the Reformation, so nothing can be checked.
St. Romuald of Ravenna
St. Bruno the Carthusian
St. Ferdinand III of Castile
In a silver coffin in the Royal Chapel at Seville, opened to view three times a year.
St. Clare of Assisi
In the crypt at Assisi, venerated continuously for seven and a half centuries.
St. Nicholas of Tolentino
St. Clare of Montefalco
Her body at Montefalco, and separately the heart in which her sisters said they found the instruments of the Passion formed in the tissue — which is a second claim entirely, and a much harder one.
St. Notburga of Rattenberg
St. Agnes of Montepulciano
St. Margaret of Castello
Visible in a glass casket on the high altar at Città di Castello. She was born blind, lame and dwarfed, and abandoned by her parents; the body is the only thing about her the world took seriously in her lifetime.
Bl. Roseline of Villeneuve
Her eyes were kept separately and are shown in their own reliquary in Provence.
St. Bernardine of Siena
St. Rita of Cascia
Substantially entire after five and a half centuries, in a crystal coffin at Cascia.
St. Antoninus of Florence
St. Catherine of Bologna
Disinterred eighteen days after burial. She is still seated upright, in a chair, behind glass in Bologna, which is the most disconcerting sight of its kind in Europe.
St. Didacus of Alcalá
The cure attributed to the touch of his body in 1562 — the heir to the Spanish throne, after a fall down a staircase — is what made Philip II champion the canonisation.
St. James of the Marches
St. Casimir of Poland
St. Catherine of Genoa
St. Angela Merici
Exhumed thirty days after death and found entire, which is what confirmed the local cult.
St. John of God
St. Francis Xavier
Buried in quicklime on Shangchuan, exhumed after ten weeks, carried to Malacca and then to Goa, and found entire at each stage. He has been in a silver casket at Bom Jesus since 1637 and is shown about once a decade; a toe was bitten off by a pilgrim in 1554 and an arm was sent to Rome in 1614.
St. John of Ávila
St. Teresa of Ávila
Her body has been divided among houses of her order since 1585, which is its own commentary on how the relic was regarded. The Carmelites examined what remains at Alba de Tormes in 2024 and reported it unchanged.
St. Charles Borromeo
In the crypt below the high altar of the Duomo at Milan, vested and masked in silver.
St. Catherine de' Ricci
St. Philip Neri
St. Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi
St. Camillus de Lellis
St. Francis de Sales
St. Martin de Porres
St. Pierre Fourier
St. Andrew Bobola
Flayed alive in 1657 and found substantially entire decades later. The cult crossed the Catholic and Orthodox divide in a region where very little else did.
St. Louise de Marillac
Ven. Mary of Ágreda
Bl. Innocent XI
St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
Found entire at the exhumation of 1830, in the chapel of the apparitions of the Sacred Heart at Paray-le-Monial.
St. Pacific of San Severino
St. Veronica Giuliani
St. Theresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart
The post-mortem is unusually detailed for 1770 and reported the heart abnormal in ways the examiners could not account for.
St. Paul of the Cross
St. Alphonsus Liguori
St. Vincent Pallotti
St. John Vianney (the Curé d'Ars)
The body at Ars is real; the face is not. What a pilgrim looks at is a wax mask, made because the face had darkened. His heart is kept separately.
St. Catherine Labouré
Exhumed in 1933, fifty-seven years after her death, and found substantially entire; she lies in the Rue du Bac chapel beside Louise de Marillac.
St. Bernadette Soubirous
The most famous case, and the most misdescribed. She was exhumed three times — 1909, 1919, 1925 — and the doctors' reports are explicit: the body was preserved, but by 1919 the skin had darkened and the nose had sunk. The face and hands a visitor sees at Nevers are light wax masks made in 1925 by Pierre Imans of Paris from imprints of her own features. The saint is under them. The face is not hers.
St. Marianne Cope
The strongest modern case on this page. Exhumed on Molokai in 2005 after eighty-seven years in a grave in salt air, with no embalming, and found entire.
St. Bartolo Longo
St. Luigi Orione
Bl. Vasyl Velychkovsky, CSsR
A Ukrainian Greek-Catholic bishop who died in 1973 after years in Soviet prisons, and lies in a shrine in Winnipeg.
Servant of God Sr. Wilhelmina Lancaster, OSB
The newest case anywhere. She died in 2019, was buried without embalming in a wooden coffin in Missouri, and was exhumed in 2023 to be moved; the body was found largely intact and the discovery drew crowds to a rural abbey for weeks. The diocese was careful to say that no judgement had been made, which is the correct thing for a diocese to say.
A part, and not the whole
Where the body went to dust and something did not. These are the cases most often quoted as incorruption and least often described accurately: Anthony of Padua is a tongue, Catherine of Siena is a head, Stephen of Hungary is a right hand.
St. Stephen of Hungary
The Holy Right Hand, found entire at the translation of 1083 and kept separately ever since; it is carried through Budapest each 20 August.
St. Anthony of Padua
Opened in 1263 by Bonaventure. The body had gone to dust; the tongue, jaw and vocal cords had not, and were red. For a preacher it was read as the obvious sign, and it is still shown at Padua.
St. Catherine of Siena
Her head is at Siena and most of her body at Rome, because both cities wanted her and the Sienese smuggled the head home in a bag.
St. John Nepomucene
Examined in 1719 for the canonisation, when soft tissue found in the skull was taken for the incorrupt tongue of a man killed for keeping the seal of confession. A scientific examination in the 1970s re-identified the tissue and the published accounts of what it concluded disagree — tongue by one reading, brain by another. Prague venerates it as the tongue, and this site records the dispute rather than settling it.
Found incorrupt, and since lost
Incorruption has never been permanent, and the Church has never said it was. Some of these were burned by men, some crumbled at a later opening, and one exuded fluid for sixty-seven years and then stopped.
St. Bonaventure
Found entire at the translation of 1434 and burned by Huguenots in the square at Lyon in 1562.
St. Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus)
Entire at the first exhumation, bone at the second.
St. Sava of Storozhi
Seized and largely destroyed by Soviet authorities in 1919, and part of the relics rediscovered decades later.
St. Vincent Ferrer
St. Francis of Paola
The Huguenots broke open the tomb at Plessis in 1562, found the body entire, and burned it. Catholics saved some bones from the fire.
St. Vincent de Paul
The case most often misreported. Exhumed in 1712, fifty-three years after his death, and found so nearly entire that the eyewitness account says only the eyes and nose showed decay. Exhumed again for the canonisation in 1737 and found decomposed, an underground flood having reached him. What hangs above the altar on the Rue de Sèvres is a wax figure over his bones, made about 1830 — very well done, and not his face. His heart is kept separately.
St. Charbel Makhlouf (Sharbel)
The strangest case here. From 1899 the body exuded a reddish fluid that soaked whatever it was vested in; it was examined again and again for sixty-seven years, stopped in 1965 just before the beatification, and by the 1977 canonisation had begun to skeletonise.
The Christian East
The East venerates incorrupt relics on its own terms and has done for longer. Its cases include the oldest continuous ones on this page — the fathers in the caves at Kiev — and the ones that survived the twentieth century by being hidden from a state that had confiscated them.
St. Spyridon of Trimythous
At Corfu, carried in procession four times a year. The island's tradition that his slippers wear out is not a claim anyone is asked to believe; it is how Corfu talks about him.
St. Anthony of Kiev
The fathers of the Kiev Caves lie where they were buried, in the dry caves themselves, and have been venerated as incorrupt for nine hundred years — the longest continuous case of the kind anywhere.
St. Theodosius of Kiev
St. Gregory Palamas
St. Sergius of Radonezh
At the Trinity Lavra since 1422, through a siege and through the Soviet campaigns.
St. Seraphim of Sarov
His relics were taken in 1920 to the Museum of Religion and Atheism in Leningrad and were found again in 1991 in a storeroom of the Kazan Cathedral.
St. Nimatullah Kassab al-Hardini
Charbel Makhlouf's teacher, at Kfifan in Lebanon.
St. Nektarios of Aegina
Preserved — but not called incorrupt
Three modern cases the Church has been careful about, and the carefulness is the point. A preserved body is not automatically an incorrupt one, and the Church's own words in these cases are weaker than the ones her devotees use.
St. Pius X
Found largely intact at the exhumation of 1944 and again in 1951. He had forbidden the embalming of his own body, which is what makes the case worth anything at all.
St. John XXIII
Exhumed in 2000 and described as remarkably preserved — and he had been embalmed in 1963 by Professor Gennaro Goglia, using a method developed for the tropics. The Church has never called this incorruption and neither does this site.
St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina
Exhumed in 2008 and called in excellent condition by the archbishop. The face shown to pilgrims is a silicone mask, made because the face was not in the condition the rest of him was.
What is not being claimed
Five things the subject is taken to mean. A reader who knows them will get more out of the strong cases, not less.
“The Church teaches that these bodies are miraculously preserved.”
The Church teaches nothing about them. Incorruption has never been defined, has never been required for a canonisation, and has never by itself been accepted as the miracle a cause needs — not once. Bodies are examined during a process because the remains have to be identified and accounted for, not because their condition proves anything. Every claim on this page is a report, and the site gives it as one.
“What you see under the glass is the saint's face.”
Often it is wax. Bernadette Soubirous, whose body is the most visited of all of them, wears light wax masks on her face and hands, made in 1925 from imprints of her own features because the skin had darkened between the exhumations. The Curé d'Ars is the same. Padre Pio's face is silicone. Vincent de Paul is wax over his own bones. None of that is a fraud — the masks are documented, and the shrines will tell you — but a visitor who has not been told assumes he is looking at skin, and he is not.
“Incorruption lasts.”
It has not. Bonaventure and Francis of Paola were found entire and then burned by men. Albert the Great was entire at one opening and bone at the next. Vincent Ferrer decayed after his canonisation. Charbel Makhlouf exuded fluid for sixty-seven years, stopped in 1965, and had begun to skeletonise by 1977. A page that lists only the bodies still intact is selecting its evidence.
“There is no natural way for a body to survive.”
There are several, and they are well understood: cold, dryness, a sealed or lime-lined tomb, tannin in the soil, the absence of gut flora in someone who had barely eaten, and the saponification that turns fat to adipocere. Some of the cases here sit in exactly those conditions. What the better cases have — Marianne Cope in salt air on Molokai with no embalming, Bernadette in a damp grave — is conditions that should have gone the other way. The distinction is worth keeping because it is the only thing that makes the strong cases interesting.
“Every famous incorrupt saint is on a list like this one.”
The famous lists are largely copied from one another and from Joan Carroll Cruz's book of 1977, and they rarely say which bodies were embalmed, which are behind wax, which have since decayed, and which nobody has opened for four hundred years. This page groups its cases by what is actually known about them, which is why the groups are uneven.
None of this is what the Church means by the resurrection of the body, and none of it is required to believe in it. A body that lasted four hundred years will end like the rest. What the shrines keep is a sign, and a sign points somewhere other than itself.