Catholic priest charged with 'body snatching' after remains of child 'saint' were exhumed from British grave

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If the Church needed to examine the body for the canonization cause there were proper channels they could’ve gone through to have it exhumed or moved elsewhere. On the surface it seems this priest was taking matters into his own hands. He should face some sort of penalty for this, what he did was illegal and wrong.

ChadS
 
I recall many years ago seeing advertisements for an exhibit at an Oxford museum about the exhumed remains of Saxons from several churchyards. It struck me as sad that these men and women, who were doubtless Catholics the same as us, had been dug up to satisfy the curiosity of men and women who had perhaps a great deal of book learning about their beliefs, but little real sympathy with them.

In the US, we periodically go through similar things with respect to Indians. Some professor or another always seems to be itching to meddle with someone’s bones in order to ascertain what the dead had to eat, or what he made the fillings of his teeth with.
The Indians object, with mixed success.

It will be interesting to learn the priest’s motives, if true, as the English case progresses.

It may make an interesting comparison.
 
From the article, true. However, we live in a time when regulations are getting more and more byzantine (meaning no disrespect to our Eastern bretheren) and when minor functionaries wield more and more power, often arbitrarilly.

With trusts and other testamentary matters, there is a doctrine called “cy pres” permits interested persons to alter a situation when original intent can no longer be carried out. An example would be if a trust provides income to a Catholic school that later closes: the law allows the income to be diverted, perhaps to another school.

One can envision this applying to a final resting place. Let us assume, for instance, that it was the boy and his mother’s wish to rest in a convent. Then, one could make the case that they would not want to rest in an housing estate parking lot. There would also be the question of who owns the bodies, because, in the case of a saint and his mother, the manner of their burial might have had aspects of a gift to the order.

All this jut to say that sometimes (but not always) cases that seem simple can in fact be complex.
 
Warrenton said:
The priest is innocent until proved guilty.
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I don’t think that’s the principle in English Law, that’s a patently American concept. Also I doubt if England has fully adopted guidelines seperating church from state, which rights are sure to be in conflict in his case.
 
1holycatholic said:
Catholic priest charged with ‘body snatching’ after remains of child ‘saint’ were exhumed from British grave
A Catholic priest has been charged with ‘body snatching’ after the remains of a child ‘saint’ were dug up in the Midlands.

Father Wojciech Jasinski, 40, has been accused of illegally exhuming the bones of Witold Orlowski.

Polish Catholics have campaigned for Witold’s canonisation since he died in a Mexican village in 1944.
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was he the priest that got healed by the boys prayers?..

what was he gonna do with the body?
 
Warrenton said:
From the article, true. However, we live in a time when regulations are getting more and more byzantine (meaning no disrespect to our Eastern bretheren) and when minor functionaries wield more and more power, often arbitrarilly.

With trusts and other testamentary matters, there is a doctrine called “cy pres” permits interested persons to alter a situation when original intent can no longer be carried out. An example would be if a trust provides income to a Catholic school that later closes: the law allows the income to be diverted, perhaps to another school.

One can envision this applying to a final resting place. Let us assume, for instance, that it was the boy and his mother’s wish to rest in a convent. Then, one could make the case that they would not want to rest in an housing estate parking lot. There would also be the question of who owns the bodies, because, in the case of a saint and his mother, the manner of their burial might have had aspects of a gift to the order.

All this jut to say that sometimes (but not always) cases that seem simple can in fact be complex.
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The article says this priest has been charged with stealing a body. Apparently he was arrested sometime last year. The authorities seem to feel they have enough evidence to proceed with the charge and isn’t simply a misunderstanding.

The place where the body was moved to has been sold by this priest’s religious order and when re-moving the body they had local police and health department officials there. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier if this priest had done it right the first time?

ChadS
 
ChadS said:
The authorities seem to feel they have enough evidence to proceed with the charge and isn’t simply a misunderstanding.
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If we each had a nickel for every time some “authority” thought he had evidence to proceed with a charge, we would all be rich, my friend.

The fact that a man wears a badge and carries the queen’s warrant does not mean anything, other than that the man has a badge and a warrant.

The police entrap people all the time, inviting the innocent to commit crimes. The police also lie, knowing that people will rely on the falsehood to their detriment. So, unfortunately, the fact of the priest’s arrest is just one factor to weigh.

We also need to look at the intent of any criminal statute: what is the evil sought to be enjoined? Without knowing the precise statute under which the priest was charged, it is hard to say for certain, but “body snatching” laws generally were enacted to prohibit various aspects of the medical industry from stealing people’s cadavers for experimentation. Other statutes are aimed at preventing builders who discover graves from doing what they frequently do, which is, well, unchristian.

A common tool of law enforcement is to use a statute that was plainly written to address one evil for a completely different end.

On earth, there is quite a distinction between what is legal and what is fair.
 
ChadS said:
The article says this priest has been charged with stealing a body.
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You bring up an interesting point. Bodies, usually, are considered personal property. This brings up the question of who has title to the property. When the ownership is vested in some kind of corporate entity (as opposed to an individual, like you or me) agency is always a question: did the priest have “authority” to do what he did as an owner. Agency can be express or implied, so it gets complicated sometimes.

There was an astonishing case of this in the US a few years ago over the body of a famous baseball player. Different family members were wrangling over different pieces of the decedent’s corpse.
 
Of course. I am simply suggesting ways the priest might be exhonorated under the criminal law.

One of the problems with the modern tendency to expand the criminal law is that criminal prohibitions frequently run afoul of pre-existing rights under civil law.

Whenever someone like Eliot Spitzer goes on a binge of prosecuting Wall Street financiers for criminal fraud, these problems crop up. In the US, it has become so bad that it is actually hard to know what the boundaries of lawful behavior are in many areas.

Some grave statutes are fairly old, so the law presumably is settled, but you never know. But a good faith claim of right is often a good defense to many criminal charges.
 
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