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 not ask Salvation, I was quoting her.
Salvation wrote this, ""I find this story very hard to believe. Do you have a parallel source other than the British source? Isn’t this the one that hates Catholics anyway?"".
Many Catholics posting on this thread have expressed shame or embarrassment, even disbelief that it could be real, about this story, yet you ignore them and won't defend it to them, why not, why didn't you ping Salvation and ask her about why she disbelieves it?
By the way, that post is a long distance from your previous, upbeat tone of joy and praise for this practice and you even coveted the jewels with a hope that you could get some of them in the future so that you "can take it with you".
Salvation, why do you disbelieve this story?
Honest to goodness, as cool as I think this story is, in the back of my mind I'm wondering about the condition of the jewelry. It looks perfect - like it could be sitting in a jeweler's case. But I don't know anything about oxidation rates in Medieval graves so I'm giving the story the benefit of the doubt just because I think it's so darn cool.