Doesn't Catechism 627 imply Shroud of Turin Not Jesus? Why Jesus not decay in 60 hr?

[Memaw]

Don’t know if this is off topic or not … but my pastor gave a homily a couple of weeks ago … that he got an emergency call to his [at the time] local hospital. So he went over between Sunday Masses and visited someone who had just died.

He was a young priest at the time. What should he do?

Well, the guidance from his seminary studies was to touch the body and if the deceased was still warm to the touch, to administer an anointing.

The person’s arm was slightly warm, so … he anointed the body.

At that point he had to return immediately to his church to say another Sunday Mass.

After the second Mass, he went back to the hospital.

The body was no longer in the emergency room; he assumed it had been removed to the hosptial morgue.

He asked around and found the [formerly] “deceased person” sitting up in a chair and chatting with relatives.

Go figure.

Later he received a very gracious letter from the family.

And the hospital staff, who had seen everything, had a new experience to share.

Is this applicable?

Is this a connection with the supernatural and/or the transcendental?

My teen cousin and his brother were walking home one evening and a car of 3 guys stopped and started a fight with them. A man called the police and when they heard the sirens they jumped in their car and took off. It wasn’t until my cousin got home that they saw blood on the back of his shirt. He didn’t even know he had been stabbed. They rushed him to the hospital and found the artery to his lung had been severed and rushing him into surgery, giving his parents very little hope. the priest came and anointed him on the way to surgery. He lived against all odds, the Dr.s said. His blood pressure had dropped so low, they couldn’t believe it came back up. Thank God for the Sacraments! God Bless, Memaw

 

[Goya]

Catechism 627 quotes the Bible, “You will not let your Holy one see corruption,” (Acts 2:26-27; cf. Ps 16:9-10) and states that Jesus’ dead body “was not a mortal corpse like others …] ‘divine power preserved Christ’s body from corruption.’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, STh III, 51, 3)”

Apparently there is consensus that the Shroud of Turin depicts a man in rigor mortis. Wikipedia editors say that rigor mortis is caused by cell membranes deteriorating. Cell membrane deterioration is bodily corruption. Thus the Shroud of Turin is not depicting Jesus.

The only rebuttal I see to this is, “CCC 627 says that his body “was not a mortal corpse like others”, therefore the rigor mortis had a different cause, other than cell deterioration.” To which one would respond, “The Church also says (likely in the Catechism as well) that Jesus was “truly man”, so it is a self-contradiction to say his dead body would not be a mortal corpse like those of other men. If Jesus was truly man, and like men in all ways except sin, then His dead body was also like the dead bodies of other men.” Here I am at an impasse. It seems Jesus could not have undergone the usual post-death processes during those ~66 hours and fulfill that Bible verse. But then it’s not clear what it means to say that Jesus experienced death!* Because to experience death is to have these things happen to your body! Sorry, I branched out into a second topic here.

CCC 627 says decay was held to begin on the fourth day. Holding this scientifically-inaccurate understanding of Sacred Scripture also resolves the dilemma, so the Shroud could still reveal Jesus. (Sorry, in a bad mood: It may not be “scientifically-inaccurate”: It is possible current scientific theory is wrong somehow; future experiments may clarify or reveal another cause for rigor mortis.)

So it seems:

1. 
   *]Rigor mortis is a form of corruption. If the Shroud of Turin depicts rigor mortis, and Jesus didn’t undergo corruption, then the Shroud of Turin does not reveal Jesus.
   *]If “bodily decay was held to begin on the fourth day after death”, why doesn’t God have the psalmist make that explicit? Why must the Bible require so much study to be understood? Why can’t it be taken literally so as to be clearly understood by all who read it?
   • CCC 630 (and earlier) clarifies that “experiencing death” simply means having soul and body separate, regardless of what happens to the body. This seems incorrect, because part of the horror of death is the actual deterioration of the body. It’s even part of the aging process, why it’s painful to get old, etc. To not undergo this part appears to be “skipping a step”, for the Incarnation to not fully embrace “our human experience”. “But death wasn’t God’s design; it was through the envy of the devil that this happens.” Nonetheless, if Jesus was to truly ‘enter into our suffering’, I don’t see why this part of it “isn’t important” to enter into. To put it another way, the Church says that we are one being, soul and body united. So experiencing the decay of the body is part of death because “our body is us”, according to this idea of unity of being.

1. 
   IMO, this stringent application of ‘corruption’, defies the very concept of death by Crucifixion to begin with. Christ’s flesh was fully human, because He was fully human–else the crucifixion itself, not to mention the scourging before hand, ought not have had any impact on Him.
   
   Rigor mortis could have set in during death–just as his flesh was torn by whips and such during the scourging, and with the thorns on his forehead, and the nails actually penetrated his hands and feet; and the the cells regenerated, upon resurrection.
   
   TBL: RM hardly rules out the Shroud of Turin, any more than death rules out Resurrection–because the latter defied science so severely, as to render any attempts as scientific understanding…shall we say, not particularly well founded.
   
   IOW: If you can’t explain the Resurrection through science…what’s the point in trying to nail down (pardon the pun) the events prior, by science?
   
   BTW: I believe the Shroud of Turin (Italy) is confirmed by the Sudarium of Oviedo, located in Spain. A great book on the latter–Sacred Blood, Sacred Image–imo, does a magnificent job in linking the 2, and showing how the latter serves to authenticate the former (albeit, not necessarily conclusively, scientifically, but enough in terms of circumstantial evidence to weigh on the side of legitimacy, at least on a preponderance of the evidence standard).
   
   JMHO/FWIW.