“That’s where there’s a big difference between you and me, Dr. Castle.”
“What’s that?”
“Simple. Jesus showed me your soul and you obviously seem to hate God as much as you seem to hate religion.”
“I don’t hate anybody,” Castle objected. “You’re projecting onto me what you want to believe about me. That’s all.”
“No, it’s not all,” Bartholomew said very slowly and very seriously. “Believing in God is an experience, not a matter of logical proof. If the existence of God could have been proved by logic or by argumentation, the issue would have been settled by Aristotle or maybe St. Thomas Aquinas at the very latest.”
“I concede the point,” Castle argued. “But so what? That the existence of God cannot be deduced from logic is hardly a news flash.”
“I understand,” Bartholomew said, returning Dr. Castle’s direct stare. “But if you’ll permit me to predict something: before you are done with me, you will end up believing in God.”
“I doubt it,” Castle answered skeptically. “You are the one here with the Jesus haircut and the stigmata, not me. This is my office you are sitting in and we’re on Fifth Avenue in the heart of New York City, not Jerusalem two thousand years ago at the time of Christ’s crucifixion and death. I’m not looking for a religious conversion and we are simply getting off track here.”
“There’s one more thing Jesus wants you to know.” Bartholomew pushed on, undeterred.
“What’s that,” Castle responded cautiously. “I can hardly wait to hear what secret Jesus has revealed about me now.”
“Jesus understands that you blamed yourself when your wife died. He also understands that you changed careers because you felt you might have caught her illness if you had been more attentive to her needs, to her mental state.”
“That’s actually not why I decided to become a psychiatrist,” Castle said firmly, rejecting Bartholomew’s suggestion that he changed careers out of guilt. “And again, you’re veering us off course.”
“Maybe so, but you have to forgive yourself.”
“What’s your point?” Castle shot back.
“My point is that you will remain dead inside until you open your heart to God, and you won’t find what you are looking for with your success as a psychiatrist or with the millions of dollars you have earned from medicine.”
“Paul, I hope you won’t take offense, but that’s what other religious people have told me before. You may think your comments are filled with great insight, but frankly I find them sophomoric. A college student taking Psychology 101 would have to do better to get an A. Quite frankly, you don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Maybe not,” Bartholomew said, “but I doubt if anyone has ever told you that you have to take the first step toward your own mental health by forgiving yourself for your wife’s death. God decides when each of us lives and when each of us dies. You may think you are more brilliant than anybody else you have ever met, including me, Dr. Castle, but you are not God.”
“That may be,” Castle responded calmly. “But since I’m the doctor here and you are the patient, you’re going to have to let me do the question asking; otherwise I won’t be able to work with you as a patient. Right now you are merely wasting time.”
“As smart as you are, Dr. Castle, you are not as clever as God,” Bartholomew said, folding his hands in his lap and sitting securely back in his wheelchair. “That is all I had to say.”
“Good, I’m glad we’re finished with that,” Castle said, determined to get back control of the interview. “Again, if we are going to make any progress here, you are going to have to let me do the question asking. I am the doctor here and you are the patient. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, I do,” Bartholomew said without argument.
“Okay, then,” Castle said, ready to start over again. “I’m going to accept for a minute that you died after your car accident, just exactly as you have said. Can you explain to me why exactly you returned back to life?”
“God asked me to return to life,” Bartholomew explained. “I was with my mother in Heaven and God said he had a mission for me to accomplish.”
“What was that mission?” Castle asked.
“First, let me ask you this.” Bartholomew wanted to make sure he had the right information. “Father Morelli said he discussed with you the Shroud of Turin. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Castle affirmed.
“All right, then,” Bartholomew continued. “What I am going to tell you is the truth, whether you can accept it or not. God asked me to return to earth to interpret to the world the Shroud codex.”
“But a codex is a book, an ancient manuscript,” Castle objected. “An image of a crucified man on a burial cloth is not a book. When you say the Shroud is a codex, what do you mean?”
“Learning to read the Shroud is like learning to read an ancient manuscript written in a language you can no longer decipher.” Bartholomew tried to explain as clearly as he could. “You may think I have stopped being a physicist. But that isn’t the case. I’ve never stopped being a physicist. Deciphering the meaning of the Shroud is like solving the most challenging equation physics has yet to solve. I will decipher the Shroud codex for the world, and when I understand the message of the Shroud and when I communicate that message to the world, the world will understand. When I had the experience of dying, after the car accident, God assured me that I would be able to communicate the message Jesus embedded in the Shroud. When I finally break through, you will be there to experience it firsthand. I’m confident you are the psychiatrist God meant me to see. Otherwise we would not be here together this day.”
Castle’s first reaction was that everything Bartholomew had just explained was delusional. “Is this why you are manifesting Jesus, with the long hair and the beard, and now with the stigmata?”
“Yes,” Bartholomew answered. “I am manifesting Jesus. It started with my physical appearance and now I am beginning to manifest the wounds Jesus experienced in his passion and death.”
Castle decided to get to his core question right away. “Are you Jesus Christ? Is that what you want me to believe?”
“No,” Bartholomew said emphatically. “I am not Jesus Christ. I am manifesting Jesus Christ.”
“Are you manifesting Jesus Christ, or your idea of Jesus Christ?” Castle asked sharply. “This is an important distinction. How do you know what Jesus Christ looked like? He’s been dead two thousand years and there’s no photographs.”
Bartholomew sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. He began slowly. “I know you don’t believe me, but when I was dead I traveled to Golgotha and I saw Jesus on the cross dying. I was there with my mother. I know I look like Jesus because I saw Jesus with my own eyes. Whether you believe it or not, the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ. God told me that was true and I saw with my own eyes that the physical Jesus who lived and died two thousand years ago is the crucified man you see today in the Shroud of Turin.”
Hearing this, Castle no longer had any doubt that Bartholomew believed his delusion was reality. Still, he knew Bartholomew was highly intelligent and he wondered how the priest would react to Castle’s hypothesis that his subconscious was manifesting the physical characteristics of the man in the Shroud because Bartholomew wanted to believe that man was Jesus. “When was the first time you saw the Shroud of Turin?” he asked.
“I was in high school. We had a weekend retreat and one of the priests showed us photographs of the Shroud of Turin as one of our meditations.”
“What impact did the Shroud of Turin make on you?”
“Profound. I had never heard about the Shroud before and I was overwhelmed to learn how precisely the image of the man in the Shroud matched the passion and death of Jesus.”
“Did you study the Shroud after that?”
“Yes, I have never stopped studying the Shroud.”
That confirmed for Castle that
Bartholomew had internalized the image of the man on the Shroud, such that his subconscious was capable of projecting that image back in the manifestations Castle was currently seeing. “Maybe studying the Shroud has made such an impact on you that your imagination has taken over. Surely you must realize that all of us project onto reality what we want to believe is true.”
Bartholomew thought for a minute, formulating his answer. “I know you think I am mentally ill,” Bartholomew said. “But you have to accept that I really did experience dying. I’m not trying to make myself look like Jesus. All this is just happening, exactly like God told me it would.”
Castle made some additional notes in Bartholomew’s file.
“Are your wrist wounds painful?” he asked.
“Not all the time.”
“How about now?”
“No, they are not painful now.”
“Are they bleeding now?”
“Not that I know.”
“You went unconscious at the altar when the wounds on your wrists appeared. Tell me what happened.”
“Again, you won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“When the stigmata hit me, while I was saying Mass, it felt like I had traveled back in time again. I was right back at Golgotha on the day of Christ’s crucifixion, just like I experienced when I died and went to Heaven. Only this time, I was the person being nailed to the cross. Somehow I had taken the place of Christ and I was feeling his pain. The nails were being driven through my wrists. The pain was excruciating. I blacked out because I couldn’t bear the pain. When I woke up, I was in the hospital. I have no idea how I got to Golgotha and I have no idea how I got back here.”
“You were a successful physicist,” Castle said. “Don’t you consider time travel far-fetched?”
“No, I don’t,” Bartholomew said, responding firmly. “You may not know much about modern physics, but I was a particle physicist. I was looking for what Einstein called the unified field theory. Multiple dimensions and time travel were part of what I studied.”
“Do you think time travel is possible?” Castle asked skeptically.
“It’s a lot more than what Jules Verne imagined,” Bartholomew answered. “I doubt if you want me to give you a graduate course in particle physics, but a lot of physicists, including me, think there are multiple dimensions, maybe as many as ten dimensions, that define our universe, not just length, height, width, and time.”
“What made you change careers and decide to become a priest?” Castle asked.
“It was my mother’s death. My mother raised me and I was devoted to her. She is maybe the only person in my life that I truly loved. After her death, I felt I needed to get closer to God. Suddenly, physics seemed to me to be going nowhere. Searching for a unified field theory only took me away from my mother while she was alive and the knowledge I gained there was no help to me whatsoever in healing her illness. She slipped away from me before I was ready to let her go.”
“How did your mother die?”
“She had ALS. I did everything I could to save her, but day by day her condition deteriorated. At the end, she lost all control of her muscles. She couldn’t even speak. I was with her, but I never really got to say good-bye to her.”
“How did you feel when she died?”
“At first I was angry,” he recalled. “Then I felt lost. I was aimless. Nothing seemed to matter.”
“Did you blame God when she died?”
“No, I blamed myself. Maybe if I had been a better son, I would have seen her illness coming on earlier, when there might have been something we could have done to prolong her life.”
“That’s exactly what you said Jesus told you about me and my wife,” Castle said. Interesting, he thought to himself. “Now tell me why you decided to become a priest.”
“I remembered my mother had always told me she believed I had a vocation and that I would have been happier had I become a priest.”
“Did you agree?”
“Not when she was alive, but after she died, it all made sense to me. I was searching for God in physics and getting nowhere. I decided to search for God in the priesthood and ever since I made that decision, my life seems to have suddenly gained purpose.”
“What about your father?”
“He died three months before I was born. In a work-related accident, I believe. I know almost nothing about my father, not even what he looked like. My mother was always reluctant to speak about him, even when I asked, and there were no photographs of him that I ever saw.”
“How about other family? Do you have any brothers or sisters that I should know about?”
“No, I was an only child.”
“Your file says you saw your mother with God, in the experience you had after your accident. Is that correct?”
Bartholomew noted carefully how Castle framed the question. “You are being very careful to avoid asking about my experience of dying after my car accident in any way that would give credence to it. But I did see her in the afterlife,” the priest insisted. “The car accident happened a few hours after I visited her grave in Morristown. I’m sure that part of the story is in my file, too. But I doubt you are ready to accept anything I could tell you about what happened to me on the operating table as if it were real.”
“Pretty much, you’re right,” Castle said. “A lot of study has been done on near-death experiences. You describe feeling yourself drawn into a tunnel and experiencing a white light—that’s a lot of what we know about how the brain dies. As far as I’m concerned, what you went through might be explained physiologically, without any reference to God whatsoever. Unfortunately, when it comes to proving something about the afterlife, we don’t have a lot of people to interview who are still dead.”
“How about me having a mental illness?” Bartholomew asked. “Have you come to any conclusions there?”
“That’s it for today,” he announced, looking at his watch. “The hour is up and it’s time for you to return to the hospital.”
“That’s all?” Bartholomew asked, surprised. “We were only getting started.”
“We will take it up again next week,” Castle said firmly, closing Bartholomew’s file and standing up. “We’re done for now.”
As Castle got up and ushered Morelli back into the room, he had some instructions.
“Father Bartholomew, I will be sending over papers to your hospital room later today so Father Morelli can have you transferred to Beth Israel Hospital. I am on staff there and I need to become your physician.”
“How much longer will I be in the hospital?”
“That depends. First, I want to run a series of tests on you. Then we will decide. I want to examine your wrist wounds with a CT scan and an MRI. Then I need to see if we can do anything to control your hair growth.”
“I want to get back to my parish as soon as possible.”
“I understand that,” Castle said. “But you are my patient now and your health is my primary concern, both physically and mentally. I won’t keep you in the hospital any longer than necessary, but I’m your doctor now and you are going to have to follow my instructions.”
“Whether I like them or not?” Bartholomew asked.
“Yes,” Castle answered firmly. “Whether you like them or not.”
CHAPTER SIX
Same day
Dr. Stephen Castle’s office, New York City
1:00 P.M. ET in New York City, 7:00 P.M. in Rome
That afternoon, Castle telephoned Marco Gabrielli in Italy. Gabrielli was a professor of chemistry at the University of Bologna who had developed an international reputation for debunking various paranormal “miracles” that various frauds and con men had perpetrated over decades on a gullible religious public eager and willing to have concrete physical demonstrations that their beliefs in God were justified. Castle managed to meet Gabrielli on his first trip to Italy years ago, at a conference held in Rome by CISAP, an organization whose
name roughly translates as the Italian Committee for Scientific Examination of Paranormal Phenomena. Castle was drawn to the CISAP meeting because the group applied the scientific method to a wide range of phenomena presumed to be explainable as paranormal, including ghosts, magic, astrology, psychic and spiritual healing, and UFOs. Gabrielli was one of CISAP’s most famous members. In their brief conversation at the meeting, Gabrielli let Castle know that he could help the psychiatrist with patients who claimed or exhibited supposedly paranormal phenomena related to religion.
Castle had worked with Gabrielli several times before. One patient, in particular, believed that the Jesus in the crucifix on his wall was crying blood. Gabrielli proved the patient had concocted an elaborate fake in which the Jesus on the crucifix turned out to be a statue with a hollow space in the head that was filled with a porous powder. The patient had glazed the statue with an impermeable liquid that was transparent to light. He then took a syringe with a long needle and inserted a syrupy red fluid into the statue through a tiny hole in its head. The porous material absorbed the red liquid, but the impermeable coating prevented the liquid from oozing out.
The crying Jesus was created when the patient scratched imperceptibly around the eyes, just enough to allow drops of the red liquid to start leaking out, appearing as if they were tears. The cavity in the head was small, so once the liquid oozed out, there typically weren’t any traces left in the statue. When the patient wanted the Jesus statue to start crying once again, all he had to do was to take the syringe and refill the cavity in the head. The patient was making a good living with the fraud, until he got careless. A would-be believer got upset when he noticed drops of the red liquid forming on the top of Christ’s head. When he pointed it out, the religious fraud threatened the would-be believer to keep quiet and, when the skeptic refused, the religious fraud beat him unmercifully. The case was referred to Castle when criminal charges were pressed and the lawyer defending the religious fraud decided to pursue an insanity defense. Castle was hired by the court to determine if the religious fraud was psychologicaly disturbed or not. Gabrielli provided the proof that the cleverness of how the blood-crying Jesus had been crafted proved the religious fraud was quite sane and very money-motivated.
The Shroud Codex Page 7