Corpse Pride

Forty years ago, Padre Pio kicked it in the Italian town of San Giovanni Rotondo. In the years since, he's become quite a popular saint. His miracle? Bleeding from the hands and feet much like Christ would rather not have done. Thanks, God! And in an effort to boost tourism, the local church has decided it would be a lovely, family-friendly idea to exhume his rotting corpse and put it on display. Of course, I would have loved it as a preteen if my parents took me to see a dead body instead of another round of mini golf, but I was also a fan of The Cure. Still, this is just another example of how the Catholic Church often seems like a theme park for the morbid. You can't even go to mass without staring up at a statue of a man literally being tortured. And if you're wondering how a man who's been dead nearly half a century still looks so good, you should know that they had to recreate his face like a wax museum dummy since the real thing was passed through various creatures' digestive systems long ago. More details here.