Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI passed away on 31 December 2022 in the morning. On 2 January, Monday, his body was transferred from the Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where he lived, to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Many of us have doubts regarding how the body of Pope Emeritus did preserve these days.
Thanatopraxia is the medical method used for preserving the body of Pope Benedict XVI. The greatest expert in thanatopraxia in Italy explained what this process consists of, which allows the conservation of the body of Benedict XVI, exposed in the Basilica of San Pedro to receive the last goodbye of the faithful.
What is thanatopraxia?
The body of Benedict XVI has been subjected to this process that allows it to be preserved for 10 to 15 days, avoiding its decomposition.
The body of Saint John Paul II also underwent this process in 2005. Andrea Fantozzi, the greatest expert in this technique in Italy prepared the body of Saint John Paul II and explained what the procedure consists of.
“Ours is a treatment that allows for fairly hygienic care and not only guarantees a more presentable appearance of the body,” Fantozzi told the Italian agency ANSA.
He specified that with this technique is not injecting formaldehyde into the arteries and veins, but a relatively new product called fluytan, which unlike the former “does not have toxic or carcinogenic characteristics.”
In addition, and as “it happened before with formaldehyde, it is not necessary to remove all the blood, as was done before.”
If formaldehyde is used, it has to remove all the blood from the body, which was done before. But with the new product, there is no need to remove all the blood from the body of the deceased. “With our new system, totally innocuous, we managed to preserve the DNA better. For this reason, thanatopraxia is beneficial for legal medicine and scientific police”, Fantozzi specified.
The expert explained that this procedure, applied to the bodies of deceased Popes, “does not yet have legal recognition” in Italy and is used “only in exceptional cases. And it is used in Italy with the foreigners who die in Italy whose bodies should be repatriated.