Your reaction is exactly like mine, this can't be true, and it had to be created to put the Vatican and the Catholic church in the worst possible light.
This story is disgusting.
I’m confused that anyone would doubt this story. One trip to an Italian church (or even Little Italy in NYC) would show this is Catholic ritual. It’s darkly medieval and probably comes out of the days of the Black Death when a huge proportion of the population was wiped out. Death was sort of a living thing to medieval people.
It reminds me of 19th Century photos I’ve seen in a New Orleans museum of children’s corpses after a typhoid epidemic. The children were too young to have been photographed prior to death, so their parents set up cameras to film the little dead bodies. Sad yet very human.
Why?