The Shroud Conspiracy

by John Heubusch

  CHAPTER 2

  Washington, DC

  March 2014

  Jon Bondurant surveyed the bright, sunlit auditorium. Only two weeks into spring semester at Georgetown University and already one-third of the worn, wooden seats in the theater-style classroom in Smith Hall were empty. The herd’s thinned, he thought. He hadn’t lectured before a college class in years, but he could tell the deadline for “drop/add”—when wavering students had to opt in or out of the class for a grade—was near. Father Pat Cleary, an old colleague from Princeton sitting in the back of the room, had been after him for months to guest lecture for his popular course on world religions at the prestigious school, and Bondurant had finally acquiesced. The priest, a courageous Jesuit, insisted his students hear from all viewpoints, including those opposite his own.

  Cleary had just introduced him as the “most misguided but influential atheist” he knew, and Bondurant smiled at the backhanded compliment. He gazed out the giant Palladian windows facing the Potomac River, which wound its way through Washington, DC, and watched the slowly moving stream of people trickle down M Street and through the narrow cobblestone lanes of the quaint village of Georgetown below. The crowded streets were filled with students ducking into noisy pubs on a warm Friday afternoon, a few of them no doubt Cleary’s missing students getting an early start on the weekend.

  From his vantage point, he could also see that he had a real problem. For some reason, his battered Jaguar, parked several blocks down the hill on the corner of 31st Street, had begun to draw a small crowd. He quickly checked his jeans pockets and realized his car keys were nowhere to be found. He sighed and squinted in the direction of the commotion. Bystanders peered into his car window and then doubled over laughing at what they saw. He had done it again. He had locked his car with the keys in it and with the engine still on. He had been late for the lecture already, and it was clear the car would either run out of gas or overheat before he could return.

  He cursed his luck, turned his attention from the debacle, and sized up the class. Little had changed in the higher echelons of academia since his much-publicized firing from Princeton years before. A few of the undergrads before him might have real promise in the field of cultural anthropology, but they had a long way to go. The confident ones would challenge his authority with irreverent questions. He enjoyed the challenges and preferred those students over the ones simply marking a requirement off their schedule. The third group comprised earnest students he considered to be on the bubble. Like a long line of their predecessors, they would study for an insane number of hours, achieve respectable grades, and enter prestigious graduate schools up and down the East Coast. There, he was certain they would blow through even more of their parents’ money before they discovered they weren’t cut out for anthropology after all. Some things never changed, he mused.

  Yet right in the center was one of the reasons he’d accepted Cleary’s invitation to appear. Sometimes one showed, sometimes not. This one was acceptable enough, a thin blonde who wore a tight denim miniskirt. Her long, shapely legs aimed at him at eye level, like a double-barreled shotgun, from the fifth row up. He had no clue who she was, but it didn’t matter. He could see she had already eyed him. Tonight, like many other nights, it was not a matter of what he would do to fight the emptiness he felt, but with whom.

  Although he was forty years old, he still attracted his share of female adulation. Physically, it all worked. Just over six feet tall, he had inherited his father’s lean frame. An NCAA swimmer and diver at Stanford, he had square, broad shoulders and traces of the distinctive Latin look passed down from his striking Argentine mother, now long since gone. His thick, graying black hair and blue eyes, along with the pronounced chiseling of his brow and high-set cheekbones, created an appealing collision of masculine and feminine features capable of drawing stares like the one he was getting from the fifth row. From a distance, he was a catch. Up close, when a woman tried to get to know him better, was another story. He looked up from the notes on his desk at the students scattered before him and broke the silence.

  “Father Cleary tells me you have ventured into the topic of religious relics. Congratulations. Let’s begin, shall we?” He circled around in front of the desk.

  He spoke with an unmistakable tone of authority in his voice, one that commanded their attention. “Whether we’re dealing with the ancient Zoroastrians or modern, misguided Christians, like many gathered here today,” he said in a low voice so as to send a few students snickering “the faiths are all the same.” He took a seat behind the worn desk and rocked back and forth on the rear two legs of the chair. “And let’s not forget the Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindi. The propensity for religions worldwide to claim authenticity for their ancient relics as having miraculous qualities, as something more than mere symbols of their faith, runs rampant through the ages.

  “These relics,” he continued, “served a useful purpose for Christianity in particular. In medieval Europe, they were big business. This was an era of superstition, when the practice of magic and miracle-related relics were commonplace. The world was flooded with ‘bogus bones.’ It was a time when the Black Death had descended on the continent. The Church was preoccupied. It did virtually nothing to stem the flood of false icons. Christians, often to save themselves, made pilgrimages to the shrines of holy people where relics were on display. That meant not only the promise of the forgiveness of sin for the pilgrims but also vital commerce for burgeoning cities. Indeed, relics nourished the faithful and filled the coffers. But in the end, they were then what they are today—merely props for the ignorant.”

  Father Cleary, seated in the back, wore an amused sort of smile on his face but kept silent.

  But for a student in the third row, it was apparently too much.

  “Don’t you think calling them ‘props’ is a bit much?” he shot out. “Epstein’s study on religious relics found their use prevalent across the world’s most popular religions. How can a billion Buddhists worshipping the healing ashes of their Masters all be wrong?”

  “Well, if it’s numbers we’re counting,” Bondurant responded with an exaggerated drawl, “I have my money on the Christians and the bones of their saints. They outnumber your Buddhists by two to one, my friend.”

  Bondurant continued. “Would it surprise you to know that the world’s poorest countries are also the most religious? A vast number of the billions of people we’re talking about, whether they’re the two billion Christians, the one and a half billion believers of Islam, or the billion Buddhists you’ve defended, are functionally illiterate. Can they all be right? They live and die believing in diametrically opposite beliefs, in a world of many gods, conflicting dogmas, and disparate conceptions of the afterlife. They are as susceptible to the mythology of artifacts and rituals of faith today as their ancestors were a thousand years ago.”

  A brunette wearing mirrored aviator glasses and a red beret looked up from her iPad for the first time that afternoon.

  “Dr. Bondurant, given we are dealing with the divine, which is beyond man’s understanding, maybe even yours,” she said as she smiled, “are you willing to concede, even as an atheist, that at least some of the relics held forth by the world’s religions may have unexplained healing attributes and have actually helped the blind man see or the crippled man walk? History is full of witnesses to miracles.”

  “Spoken like a true Christian,” Bondurant said. “You are Christian, correct?”

  “Since birth.”

  “All right, then,” he pushed back. “Since you asked, let’s zero in on Christianity for a few minutes, and when we’re done, you tell me if the blind man sees.”

  Two Lands’ End catalog–worthy preppies ceased their texting and looked up with interest.

  “How many here are familiar with the Veil of Veronica?” Bondurant asked as he scanned the room.

  Only two hands rose.

  He pointed to the one of the two who had braved sitting in the fro
nt row. “You’re it. What’s your name?”

  “Tom Kelso,” the student said somewhat sheepishly. “I think it has something to do with the Crucifixion of Christ. There’s something about a veil given to Jesus. I believe it’s depicted on one of the Stations of the Cross.”

  “Close, Mr. Kelso.” Bondurant rose from his chair, walked around to the front of his desk, and sat on it.

  The blonde in the miniskirt quietly snapped a photo of him with her phone and nervously looked away. If she thought he hadn’t noticed, she was wrong. And that’s when he knew for sure he had found another hapless victim. Sleep with her for two, three nights running, he figured. Give her nothing to latch on to. Then ignore her for days until she got the message. He knew there would be some guilt from how he’d treat her, as there had been with the others, but there wasn’t a chance she would ever get to know him. How could she? he thought. He was still a mystery to himself. He refocused his mind on the lecture.

  “The Veil of Veronica, also known as the Sudarium or the Volto Santo, meaning ‘Holy Face,’ is a Catholic relic, a cloth that is said to bear the actual likeness of the face of Jesus Christ. This makes it, boys and girls, a first-class relic, an item directly associated with Jesus’s life. Also first class would be a physical part of a saint, such as a bone or a strand of hair.”

  He turned to his laptop computer, which rested on the stool in front of him.

  “I need one of you next to the windows to pull the shades and kill the lights,” he said.

  As the fluorescent lights overhead went dark, an image of what appeared to be a crude painting of a bearded face on a small cloth appeared on the large screen behind him.

  “This is a first-class relic?” one student asked as he leaned toward the screen. “No fair. It’s just a painting on a napkin.”

  “Painting or not,” Bondurant admonished as he pointed to the image, “this cloth—the ‘Veil of Veronica’—is said to have touched the face of Jesus Christ. In fact, its appearance is said to be, by miracle, the actual image of Jesus’s face. And as far as relics go, you don’t get more first class than that.”

  “Well,” another student suggested, “if this is first class, whatever comes in as second or third is definitely suspect.”

  “In the second-class relic category,” Bondurant said, pressing forward, “is something—anything—owned by or associated with a saint, like a shirt, a crucifix, a book, or, interestingly, instruments of torture used against a martyr. The latest estimates put the number of saints at between twenty and thirty thousand, so imagine the number of second-class relics that are claimed to be associated with them. Third-class—well, they are absurd. You don’t want to hear about them.”

  “Might as well,” the blonde in the denim miniskirt called out confidently.

  “Okay,” he said. “Welcome. Did you drive to class today?”

  “Yes,” she replied, worried she was going to get more than she bargained for by chiming in.

  “Throw me your car keys.”

  Reaching into her purse, she flung them forward. He held them aloft for the class to see.

  “If these keys, or even the—it’s a Porsche, is it?” he asked.

  “It is,” she said.

  “Well, if these keys or the Porsche she apparently drives ever come in contact with the veil you see here—let’s say she ran it over—or if they ever touch the bone of a saint, they would be considered a third-class relic.”

  “How about you? You seem old enough to have lived with the saints,” another said. “Wouldn’t that make you a third-class relic, Dr. Bondurant?”

  The room tittered.

  “Astute. Now back to the veil,” he said. Having secured his ride home, he slid her keys onto the desk behind him and prepared to turn toward the screen again. She crossed her legs, threw him a ready look, and smiled.

  “According to Church legend,” he said, “Saint Veronica approached Jesus during the Passion, the agony of bearing the Cross up Mount Calvary. Miraculously, when she wiped clean the face of Christ with her veil, this image of the savior’s face was left indelibly on the cloth. A miracle!

  “Now,” he continued, pointing again to the bold image on the screen, “it has been believed for twenty centuries that this veil has the power to cure blindness, quench thirst, and, like Christ, raise the dead. Since the fourteenth century, the veil has been one of the most venerated relics of the Church, has it not, Father Cleary?”

  “To this day, my misguided friend,” the priest replied.

  “Who here has ever been to Jerusalem?” Bondurant asked.

  No hands went up.

  “Well, I recommend it. Among the hundreds of souvenir booths you will wade through on Via Dolorosa—the ‘Way of Grief,’ where hawkers sell crucifixes and other Passion tchotchkes—you will find a small church known as the Chapel of the Holy Face. That is the supposed site of the miracle that brought us the image of Jesus Christ’s face on Veronica’s Veil.

  “The New Testament is exhaustive on the Passion of Christ and his bearing of the Cross up Calvary, and yet there is not a single mention of Veronica’s Veil in any of the Gospels,” Bondurant said. “And then the veil is lost to history for over a thousand years, until it miraculously appears somewhere in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries in St. Peter’s in Rome.

  “Here the plot thickens,” he said, and grinned.

  “In the year 1600, the veil mysteriously disappears. Then, like the loaves and fishes of the Gospels, a multitude of veils appear out of thin air,” he said as he rubbed his hands together. “Another miracle, one presumes? Today, there are at least six Veronica’s Veils, all claiming to be the original. All of these veils are venerated by the Church as miraculous originals. And each of them bears an entirely different image of Jesus’s face.”

  He advanced the slides . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . to reveal several more images of Christ’s face on cloth, each cruder than the one before, and all radically different.

  “They can be found in chapels and monasteries spread across the European continent. From St. Peter’s in Rome—”

  Click.

  “—to the Hofburg Palace in Vienna—”

  Click.

  “—to the Monastery of the Holy Face in Spain. The last time the Church allowed an inspection of one of the veils was over a hundred years ago, and the report of the image seen on the veil fell somewhat short of miraculous. To quote from the summary of the report: ‘Two brown spots on faded material connected to each other.’ Looks like a Rorschach test, doesn’t it?”

  Kelso in the front row interrupted.

  “Are there any documented miracles tied to the veils?” he asked with a trace of hope in his voice.

  “Documented scientifically? None,” Bondurant replied. “Not a one. Now, someone ask me about the True Cross.”

  “Is this a trick question?” a bearded hiker type with a ponytail offered from the back.

  “That depends on your point of view,” Bondurant replied.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What about the True Cross?” the hiker asked.

  “It’s false,” Bondurant deadpanned.

  Click.

  A small piece of wood and a broken piece of a stone tablet next to it appeared on the screen.

  “Of course, we are talking about the cross upon which Jesus Christ was supposedly crucified,” Bondurant said. “Found by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, who traveled to Palestine during the fourth century in search of relics. Pieces of the True Cross can now be found preserved in literally hundreds of churches across Europe. This particular piece, along with a piece of tablet that has half of INRI—meaning ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’—inscribed on it, can be found in the ancient Basilica of Santa Croce in Rome.”

  “Why is this so far-fetched?” a pretty redhead with glasses to match asked from the side.

  “Well, like I said, there are so many churches that claim to possess a piece of the True Cross th
at during the Middle Ages, the famous theologian John Calvin estimated that if all these pieces of wood claiming to be from the Cross were gathered together, one could build an entire ship. My recollection from the story of the Gospels is that it was Jesus Christ your savior alone, admittedly with some help from Simon of Cyrene along the way, who carried the Cross up Calvary.

  “Now, good Catholics,” he asked, his cynicism on display for all to see, “what is this?”

  Click.

  A rusty, twisted spike appeared on the screen.

  “It’s obviously an old nail of some kind,” someone replied from the back.

  “Not just any nail,” Bondurant protested. “This is reportedly one of the three or four nails the Church believes was used in the Crucifixion of Jesus. It rests in that same basilica in Rome along with a piece of the True Cross. Having supposedly pierced the body of Jesus, you won’t find a relic more first class than this.”

  “So what’s the problem?” a student with a deep Boston accent asked.

  “The problem,” Bondurant said, “is that at last count there are thirty or more of these Holy Nails on display in churches from Venice to Nuremberg to Prague. My recollection of the Gospels is that while Jesus was said to be a carpenter, the Roman soldiers did not help him build a house up on Calvary. They say they nailed him to a cross.”

  Bondurant punched quickly now through his slides in staccato fashion.

  Click.

  “Here we have one of several dozen Crowns of Thorns placed upon the head of Jesus before the Crucifixion,” he said. “Your reading of the New Testament will reveal that there was only one such crown. It is one of the most venerated relics in the history of Christianity. Despite enormous scientific effort, none of the many in existence have ever been authenticated.”

  Click.

  “Here we have the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the Bridle of Constantine, said to be made from yet more Holy Nails from the Crucifixion.”