Tests revealing bones not Joan's don't affect church, official says

Published: 2007-04-24

OXFORD, England (CNS) -- A forensic scientist's findings that bone fragments are not those of St. Joan of Arc would not "change anything for the church," said a French church official. "These remains have never been regarded as relics by the church -- although we knew of their existence, they were never the objects of cult or devotion," said Bertrand Vincent, spokesman for France's Tours Archdiocese. Vincent said the church always maintained that St. Joan's "remains were burned and scattered -- though historians and researchers may probe the record, nothing has happened to change it." Nature, an international science journal, reported April 4 the results of the yearlong examination by Philippe Charlier, a professor at a hospital west of Paris, on pieces of bone and cloth allegedly retrieved from Rouen, where St. Joan was put to death. Nature reported that spectrometry, electron microscopy and carbon-14 tests had revealed the "sacred scraps" were remains of an Egyptian mummy dating from 600-300 B.C.

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