The Shroud Codex (11 page)

“Did this come out during his lifetime?”

“Yes. In 1922, the Vatican forbade Padre Pio from hearing the
confessions of women, then the next year the Vatican forbade him from teaching teenage boys. He was famous for claiming the devil came to him every night with every sort of sexual fantasy to tempt him to what he called ‘uncleanness.’ The Holy See eventually became convinced Padre Pio used his fame to sexually pervert boys, that he was a pedophile, just like the priests you had to deal with in the New York archdiocese.”

“Why didn’t this prevent Padre Pio from being declared a saint?”

“Padre Pio was loved, especially in southern Italy. Even today, more Italian Catholics pray to Padre Pio than to any other saint. He is venerated as a celebrity in Italy and he is constantly covered in the Italian equivalents of
People
magazine, even though he has been dead for over forty years.”

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” Castle said.

“Believers say Padre Pio had the gift of bilocation, the ability to be in two places at once, proof to many that he had supernatural powers God would only have granted him if his faith in Christ was genuine and his stigmata real. Others claimed that he could heal the sick. It goes on and on. Padre Pio’s Masses were very unpredictable. He seemed to go into trances at the altar and he claimed he had visions with Jesus, or with the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, where he could speak with them and they would advise him or tell him intimate secrets.”

“Sounds very much like what Father Bartholomew told me,” Castle said. “That he could see and speak with Jesus, even that Jesus was present with him in my treatment room.”

“Mass with Padre Pio got so bizarre that parishioners just sat in the church, sometimes for hours, and waited for him to come back to reality so he could finish the Mass. Others say he could prophesize the future, that he told a young Karol Wojtyla, visiting from Poland, that he would be elected pope one day, even though
Padre Pio said he would never live to see that day. It’s part of the lore. A lot like Nostradamus. Those who believe Nostradamus predicted the future claim he met a young monk one day, Felice Paretti, when the young man stopped to take a drink from a fountain in the street. Nostradamus evidently saw him in the street for the first time and immediately predicted he would be pope. Paretti did become Pope Sixtus V, but this supposed meeting-in-the-street prediction came to light only decades later, long after Nostradamus was dead and Paretti’s papacy was an historical fact.”

“So do you think you could explain Father Bartholomew’s stigmata by a similar fraud? Do you think his stigmata are not real?”

“I don’t know,” Gabrielli said honestly. “You’re the doctor. I will leave the medical examination up to you. I’m a chemist. All I could do is examine Father Bartholomew’s claimed stigmata to see if I could figure out a natural way chemicals could have been used to produce the wounds.”

The discussion with Gabrielli was opening Castle’s mind. Up to now, the psychiatrist had assumed that Father Bartholomew’s wounds might be real, even if they were produced by the action of his subconscious. Gabrielli was suggesting that historically important religious figures—like Padre Pio—who had manifested supernatural phenomena might have been brilliant frauds who had actually concocted their miracle manifestations with sophisticated chemical legerdemain, such that their trickery could not be easily detected. Gabrielli had proved it was possible to create stigmata by clever application of chemicals, then carefully obscure the wounds so no one got too close a look, especially not medical doctors.

Gabrielli was also very careful in how he attacked Padre Pio. What he said was “this is how it could have been done,” a discreet way of raising doubt that the only explanation for Padre Pio’s
stigmata had to be supernatural. While he had not proved Padre Pio was a fraud, Gabrielli had managed to suggest the possibility very convincingly.

Castle next explained to Gabrielli about how Father Bartholomew was manifesting the Shroud of Turin.

“That’s another fake,” Gabrielli answered instantly. “I’ve been working on it for years.”

“How do you know it is fake?”

“In 1988, the Vatican allowed three laboratories to do carbon dating on the Shroud. All three labs were highly reputable—at Oxford University, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The Church gave each of the researchers a sample of the Shroud and their results were all the same. The Shroud dates from 1260 to 1390. It’s a medieval fake produced in the thirteenth or fourteenth century when Europe was full of Christians eager to venerate any relic of Christ’s crucifixion.”

Investigating the carbon-dating tests conducted on the Shroud was on Castle’s to-do list, but he still did not know the details.

“Would you like to see some nails from the True Cross? There are golden reliquaries in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris that even today hold what many Christians venerate as the actual nails used to crucify Jesus. If you could have taken all the pieces of wood that were claimed in medieval times to have come from the true cross of Jesus and put them together, you would have had a forest. Then, if you took all the nails claimed in medieval times to be nails from the crucifixion of Jesus, you could have taken true cross boards and built a house. Forgers in medieval times made a fortune producing and selling to believers relics of Christ’s crucifixion.”

“You have a point,” Castle said. Forging relics must have been a big business.

Gabrielli continued: “Besides, there’s a medieval letter that says the Shroud is a fake.”

“What letter is that?” Castle asked.

“It was written in 1389 by Bishop Pierre d’Arcis to the Avignon pope Clement VII stating that the Shroud was a clever fake. According to the letter, Bishop d’Arcis claimed that his predecessor, Bishop Henri de Poitiers of Troyes, had conducted an inquiry that identified a painter who confessed to having painted the Shroud.”

“Who was the painter?”

“Unfortunately, the letter did not identify the painter by name.”

“So, if the Shroud is a fake, do you think you could duplicate it, using only medieval materials and processes?” Castle asked, getting to the key point.

“I believe I can,” Gabrielli said. “I’ve already done some preliminary work and I think I can produce a fake Shroud that looks a lot like the original.”

Castle was not convinced Gabrielli would succeed, but it was worth a try. Maybe Father Bartholomew was trying to perpetrate a huge hoax, starting with making up the nonsense about seeing God after supposedly dying on the operating table following his car accident. Could Bartholomew have been crazy enough to have actually caused the accident, with the intent to perpetrate this hoax? He would have needed some luck to survive the crash, even if he had planned it. Castle doubted anyone would go so far, but he did not discount the other possibility: that the hoax came to Father Bartholomew’s imagination after he woke up in the hospital having survived the car crash. Castle recalled a Brooklyn crime ring that set up fake car accidents in which people were “killed” or “hurt” so they could file bogus insurance claims for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What was clear to Castle was that if Gabrielli could produce a
credible fake Shroud, then he could say to the Church that there was no way Father Bartholomew was mystically manifesting the real crucified Jesus as part of a mission given him by God. Having a credible fake Shroud would certainly support Castle’s hypothesis that Father Bartholomew had an overactive subconscious that was working below the surface to manifest what Father Bartholomew unconsciously thought the historical Jesus looked like, based on Father Bartholomew’s admitted study of the Shroud.

Castle proposed that he and Gabrielli work together. “I can easily get a book contract for this,” Castle explained, “and we could coauthor the work. I will supply the psychiatric analysis and you provide the scientific analysis. Father Bartholomew will be our case study. The book will proceed from the findings of my previous book,
The God Illusion,
in that I want to argue people invent God to satisfy their own inadequacies and make up for their own perceived fears and deficiencies. You will just be advancing your work that there are scientific explanations that explain paranormal religious phenomena, just as you did with stigmata.”

“Makes sense to me,” Gabrielli said. “I would love to collaborate with you on such a project.”

Same day

Dr. Stephen Castle’s office, New York City

Midnight in New York City, 6:00
A.M.
next day in Rome

The pope called Dr. Castle at midnight, just as Archbishop Duncan had arranged after Castle’s first interview with Father Bartholomew.

“Dr. Castle, I want to thank you for taking this case,” the pope began.

“You’re welcome, your Holiness,” Castle answered respectfully. “I just want to make sure we understand one another before I get too deeply into it. I helped you and Archbishop Duncan once before, but that doesn’t mean I’m a great friend of the Catholic Church. I’m still an atheist and I still think religion is basically a neurosis.”

“I know that’s what you believe,” the pope answered. “I didn’t expect you had changed your views.”

“And now I want to make sure you are not hiring me to prove the Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of the historical Jesus. If that’s your goal, I’m the wrong man for the job.”

“Why don’t you believe the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus, then?”

“For starters, the face of the man in the Shroud is all wrong for me. My first impression when I saw the photographs of the Shroud was that the face looks like the face a medieval European artist would have painted for Jesus. The historical Jesus was Semitic. The man in the Shroud looks Italian. It makes sense. If you wanted to sell a forgery, you would probably make Jesus look like the people you were trying to get to buy your handiwork.”

“I’m not surprised that’s your conclusion.”

“You should also know that I spent most of the afternoon today on the telephone with Professor Marco Gabrielli at the University of Bologna.”

The pope knew Gabrielli well. “Then you probably heard a lot about why he thinks Padre Pio was a fraud.”

“I did,” Castle said. “We spent a lot of time talking about how carbolic acid could have been used to cause those wounds to appear on Padre Pio’s palms.”

“This case is not about Padre Pio,” the pope said without hesitation. “Pope John Paul II declared Padre Pio a saint in 2002 and that declaration is now a dogma of faith that is affirmed by the infallibility of the pope. The Church heard all those arguments decades ago and rejected them. I don’t for a minute want to consider anything about Padre Pio being a fraud. That’s not why I’m interested in Father Bartholomew.”

Castle’s mind worked rapidly to process what he was being told. If the pope did not want any questions raised about Padre Pio, why did the pope want him to work on Father Bartholomew, especially when both cases involved stigmata? If Father Bartholomew were proven to be a fraud, then new doubt would undoubtedly fall on Padre Pio, a saint the Catholic Church rushed to get canonized. So why was it, exactly, that the pope wanted him to
work on this case when everybody knew he was an avowed atheist? He had just told the pope he was planning to work with an Italian chemist who had built an international reputation by debunking miracles. It didn’t make any sense.

“Why would you want to prove Father Bartholomew is a hoax?” Castle asked the pope. “It has to be obvious to you that I am setting out to do just that.”

“Yes, it is obvious to me what you are doing,” the pope admitted. “But there is also something I want to try to explain to you.”

“What’s that?”

“Have you ever heard of Bishop Malachy?”

“Yes, vaguely,” Castle responded. “Wasn’t he the first Irish saint?”

“Yes, and he is associated with a prophecy that I am going to be the last pope. A Benedictine historian named Arnold Wion published a book in 1559 titled
Lignum Vitae,
in which a list attributed to the Irish Malachy listed one hundred and twelve popes yet to come, each designated by a Latin phrase that identified the pope. Pope Benedict XVI, my predecessor, was next to last. Malachy designated him as ‘Gloria Olivae,’ or ‘Glory of the Olive.’ Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, was not a Benedictine priest, yet he chose the name of St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order. The symbol of the Benedictine order includes an olive branch. Each of the one hundred and ten before Benedict XVI were identified equally as well by Malachy.”

Castle listened, wondering where the pope was headed with this.

“The designation for the last pope was ‘Petrus Romanus,’ or ‘Peter the Roman.’ I did not want to take Peter II as my name for several reasons. I thought it presumptuous to name myself second to the disciple of Jesus who founded the Catholic Church. Jesus
designated St. Peter to lead his church with the famous blessing, ‘Upon this rock I found my church.’ I’m sure you know that ‘Peter’ is the English translation of the Latin and Greek word for ‘rock.’ I greatly admire Pope John Paul II and taking the name Pope John-Paul Peter I permitted me to put Peter in my name without having to be Peter II. Maybe it was just superstitious, but I was born in Rome, so I fit the ‘Petrus Romanus’ description Malachy gave to the last pope.”

“So you believe in these predictions then?” Castle asked.

“I’m not entirely sure. It’s altogether possible the predictions were just attributed to Bishop Malachy, or maybe the believers in the predictions have just interpreted Malachy’s descriptors so that they match after the fact, regardless of who was chosen pope in Malachy’s number sequence. The descriptors are vague. Malachy’s descriptor for Pope John Paul II was ‘From a solar eclipse.’ The believers have gone pretty far afield to identify Karol Wojtyla with that phrase, even arguing that it was fulfilled because Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920, a day when there was a solar eclipse over the Indian Ocean. I don’t know. But still, I have had a feeling since the College of Cardinals moved to elect me pope that my papacy would have momentous consequences for the Catholic Church. I don’t need to list our problems for you. The Catholic faithful in the United States have dropped church attendance dramatically since the priest scandal. I worry for the future of the Church’s finances.”