A married couple found their baby’s body in an incorruptible state during a re-burial.
By Catholics for Catholics
Some call it a miracle. Others call it incorruptible. His parents simply call him St. Brian.
What is true is that for almost 40 years, a baby’s body was preserved intact after his death. When he was unearthed after all that time, the infant looked like the day he died.
“It was like, oh my gosh, we get to see our son again,” said the mother, Mary Pat Gallagher. “I picked him up. It was beautiful… I could hold him again.”
It all happened in 2019, when, according to CatholicVote, Mary Pat and Shawn Gallagher were disposing to relocate their infant son’s remains almost 40 years after his death. They got a phone call that left them dumbfounded.
The call was from the funeral director.
“Mary Pat, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mary Pat recalled the director saying in an interview with CatholicVote. “He looks just like he’s sleeping.”
It all started in 1982, when Mary Pat Gallagher gave birth to a son, Brian, at Fort Knox Army Base in Kentucky. But some complications led to the baby’s transfer to a neonatal intensive care.
Doctors struggled to resuscitate Brian, but the baby died soon after birth.
Fast-forward 37 years.
In 2019, the Gallaghers arranged to move their son’s remains so that he could one day be buried close to them at a veteran’s cemetery in South Dakota. During the re-burial process, the original casket was accidentally broken, requiring it to be opened so Brian’s body could be transferred to a new one.
What they saw stunned them. Their son’s little body at Black Hills National Cemetery looked as if time had not passed by.
According to the Gallaghers, their son’s body had been buried and embalmed in a regular infant casket. His body had undergone an autopsy, but during the re-internment, the funeral director was able to redress the baby’s body without disturbing it.
“He was just this perfect baby, like we had just buried him that day,” Mary Pat Gallagher recalled. “There was no decomposition, no discoloring. It gives us goosebumps to this day.”
The Gallaghers recalled that the baby had been baptized before he died, but no baptismal records were found, leading them to think that maybe their son had not been baptized.
Still, nursing notes from the hospital that day confirmed that a priest had performed a conditional baptism about 35 minutes after Brian was pronounced dead.
According to CatholicVote, in March, a chance happenstance at a Catholic women’s luncheon led Mary Pat to share Brian’s story with speaker Brianne Edwards, herself a grieving mother. At first, Mary Pat believed the Holy Spirit had nudged her to comfort Edwards with the story — but later came to see that same moment as a divine prompting to begin sharing Brian’s story with the world.
Edwards took on the mission, forming a website, consulting canon lawyers, and launching a petition for his potential cause for canonization.
Today, the petition is under review by two bishops: Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, who has said he would support an investigation if the local bishop initiates one, and Bishop Scott E. Bullock of the Diocese of Rapid City, from whom the Gallaghers are still awaiting a response.
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