The Shroud Codex
Page 8
Gabrielli was a man in his late forties, with a European build he kept thin from vigorous walking and a modest diet. He sported a Van Dyke beard and mustache. With his disheveled black hair, he looked like either an inspired artist whose mind was always somewhere else, or a mad scientist, which was probably the more apt conclusion. Gabrielli favored turtleneck sweaters and tweed sport jackets; he could have stepped out of a university lecture hall. In his many videos, which peppered Italian websites and were increasingly gravitating, in English translation, to YouTube, Gabrielli could be seen in his laboratory, wearing a white lab coat and working over one of the various apparatuses that he used to reproduce scientifically the “supernatural” phenomenon that had captured the public imagination. But what gained Gabrielli his large following was his sarcastic wit. His wry smile and green eyes darting beneath his bushy eyebrows gave many the impression that Gabrielli was a little boy who had discovered all by himself that there never was any Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
Over the telephone, Castle described Father Bartholomew’s case.
“Did you examine the stigmata?” Gabrielli asked.
“No, his arms were bandaged and I typically don’t perform medical examinations in my psychiatric office,” Castle explained. “I am a physician on staff at Beth Israel Hospital here in New York City and I’m in the process of transferring Father Bartholomew to my care. I plan to examine his stigmata once I get him admitted as my patient.”
“Have you seen his medical charts?”
“Yes. The attending physician noted that the wounds did appear to have pierced through the wrists. Still, until I examine the wounds myself, I won’t be able to tell for sure. The attending physician did not have a CT scan or MRI performed. Until I order those tests and examine Father Bartholomew myself, I won’t know if the stigmata wounds penetrate his wrists or if the wounds always were just superficial.”
“I’m sure you know that in Padre Pio’s case there were no wounds at all. His stigmata were completely faked.”
“What do you mean?” Castle asked, surprised to hear this.
“Padre Pio died on September 23, 1968, and he was buried four days later at the San Giovani Rotondo shrine in Pietrelcina, the little town where he lived most of his life as a priest,” Gabrielli said. “In April 2008, on the fortieth anniversary of his death, his body was exhumed. The Church kept Padre Pio’s body on display for well over a year. Thousands of people made the trip, some from the United States, to Pietrelcina to see Padre Pio’s body on display.”
“Sounds bizarre,” Castle said.
“In a way it is. But the faithful believe that because Padre Pio’s body had not deteriorated in death, it was a sign from God that his life was holy and he is now a saint. Otherwise they think the body would not have been preserved like this, in an incorrupt state, some forty years after he died.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Not for a minute,” Gabrielli answered without hesitation. “But that’s not the important part of the story. When the body was first exhumed, Bishop Domenico d’Ambrosio examined the body. I know Bishop d’Ambrosio quite well. He told me Padre Pio’s body was well preserved; that part is true. From the very beginning of the exhumation, you could clearly see his beard and he was still wearing the mittens that covered the stigmata on his wrists. There were parts of his body that had decayed. You could see the skull and part of the cheekbone was exposed. The public never saw his whole body, just his body in his brown Capuchin habit with an elaborate silk stole embroidered with crystals and gold. His face was covered with a silicone mask that was very life-like. But the hands were so well preserved that d’Ambrosio said Padre Pio’s fingernails were intact. The point is that d’Ambrosio examined Padre Pio’s hands and feet and swore there were no signs of the stigmata. Legend has it that Padre Pio’s stigmata disappeared at the moment of his death. That was the testimony of his fellow friars and the doctor who attended to him at his death.”
“That’s convenient, isn’t it,” Castle said sarcastically. “The moment he dies, the stigmata just disappear.”
“But there’s more,” Gabrielli went on. “A historian digging through the Vatican archives found a letter from a pharmacist who claimed he visited Padre Pio in 1919 and Padre Pio gave him an empty bottle that he asked him to fill with carbolic acid. The pharmacist said Padre Pio claimed he needed the carbolic acid to disinfect syringes for injections. Padre Pio also used other common medications of the time, like Valda tablets, which were a mild, plant-based antiseptic that people used to take for throat or bronchial ailments.”
“What’s the significance of the carbolic acid?”
“I’ve got a video right now on the Internet that shows how you can create stigmata with commonly available chemicals. You apply iron chloride on one hand and let it dry and put potassium ferrocyanide on the other hand and let it dry. Then when you rub your two palms together the chemicals combine to produce what looks like stigmata wounds. The chemical action is painless and disappears quickly, once you wash your hands. On the same video I show how you can customize a razor to scrape the palms of your hands to produce bleeding sores that look exactly like stigmata. Carbolic acid is a mild disinfectant that will keep open wounds from getting disinfected. Going back to 1918, visitors to Padre Pio claimed his wounds had a smell of carbolic acid and that he covered up the smell with eau de cologne, claiming his blood had a miraculous fragrance.”
“So you are convinced Padre Pio was a fraud?” Castle asked.
“Yes, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever,” the chemist answered.
“Padre Pio would never let any physician examine his wounds to see if they penetrated clear through his wrists. He always claimed the pain was too severe when doctors tried to see whether or not their fingers would meet through the stigmata wounds on his wrists, and no physician ever managed to convince him to go under anesthetic to be examined in a hospital setting. Padre Pio always wore those mittens over his hands, so that the stigmata were largely covered up. Padre Pio was serious about hiding his wounds. All you could ever see were photographs that showed bleeding palms from a distance, or what appeared to be scabs of crusted blood at the edges of the mittens, supposedly resulting from blood flowing from the wounds. But who knew? As far as I am concerned, Padre Pio’s stigmata were never subjected to rigorous medical examination when he was alive.”
“Why hasn’t this come out?”
“It has come out. There are even persistent rumors in Italy that Pope John XXIII was confronted with evidence by a Vatican investigator who examined Padre Pio’s secret files in the process of declaring him to be a saint. There is evidently a journal entry John XXIII wrote in his diary lamenting the evidence that Padre Pio committed sexual indiscretions with women who were part of his inner circle. There were even accusations that he had sex with women in the confessional, or that he invited them to visit him privately in his cell, where they stayed the night. Other accusations were that he took money in the confessional, enriching himself. Padre Pio finally admitted that this was true, but he claimed he gave the money to poor penitents.”
“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.”
“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.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
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 anot
her 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.”