The Fifth Gospel (5 page)

C
HAPTER
5

S
EVEN HUNDRED YEARS
ago in a small French village, a Christian relic surfaced for the first time in Western history. No one knows where it came from or how it got there. But slowly, like all relics, it trickled up into better hands. The royal family of that region came to own it. And in time they transferred it to their Alpine capital.

Turin.

The Shroud of Turin purports to be the cloth in which Jesus Christ was buried. On its surface is a mysterious, almost photographic image of a crucified man. For five centuries it has lain in a side chapel of the cathedral in Turin, so carefully cared for and protected that it's displayed to the public only a few times each century. Just twice, in half a millennium, has it been removed from the city: once when the royal family was fleeing Napoleon, and again during World War Two. That second journey brought it to a monastery in the mountains near Naples, where the cloth was protected in secrecy. It was on the way to that monastery that the Shroud, for the only time in history, passed through Rome.

The only time in history, until now.

Most relics are kept in special vessels called reliquaries. Seven years ago, in 1997, a fire in the Turin cathedral nearly destroyed the Shroud while it lay in its silver reliquary. Afterward, a new vessel was designed: an airtight box made of an aeronautic alloy, designed to protect the pre
cious cloth from anything. The new box, not coincidentally, resembles a very large casket.

Over that casket is draped a gold cloth embroidered with the traditional Latin prayer for the Shroud.
Tuam Sindonem veneramur, Domine, et Tuam recolimus Passionem.

We revere Your Holy Shroud, O Lord, and meditate upon Your Passion.

I am sure, to a moral certainty, that what Leo saw in the bed of that cargo truck was the most famous icon of our religion. The capstone of the historic exhibit that Ugo Nogara created in the Shroud's honor.

I MET UGO NOGARA
because I made it my business to try to meet all of Simon's friends. Most priests are good judges of character, but my brother used to invite homeless men over for dinner. He would date girls who stole more silverware than the homeless men. One night, when he was helping nuns operate the Vatican soup kitchen, two drunks got into a fight, and one pulled a knife. Simon stepped in and wrapped his hand around the blade. He refused to let go until the gendarmes came.

The next morning, Mother decided it was time for therapy. The psychiatrist was an old Jesuit with an office that smelled like wet books and clove cigarettes. On his desk was a signed picture of Pius XII, the pope who said Freud was a pervert and Jesuits shouldn't smoke. My mother asked if I should wait outside, but the doctor said it was only an informal evaluation, and if Simon needed treatment, she would have to wait outside as well. So my mother, in tears, took her one chance to ask if there was a medical term for Simon's problem. Because the term in all the magazines was “death wish.”

The Jesuit asked Simon some questions, then asked to see where the drumstick of his thumb was sutured back to his palm. Finally he said to my mother, “Signora, are you familiar with a man named Maximilian Kolbe?”

“Is he a specialist?”

“He was a priest at Auschwitz. The Nazis starved him for sixteen days before poisoning him. Kolbe volunteered for this punishment in order to save the life of a perfect stranger who would have been killed instead. Would you say this is the sort of behavior that concerns you?”

“Yes, Father. Exactly. Do you have a name in your profession for men like Kolbe?”

And when the Jesuit nodded, my mother cracked a hopeful smile, because anything with a name might have a cure.

Then the doctor said, “In my profession, signora, we call them martyrs. And in the case of Maximilian Kolbe, we call him the patron saint of this century. A death wish is not the same as a willingness to die. Take heart. Your son is just an unusually good Christian.”

One year later, Mother escaped her greatest fear: that she would outlive Simon. And the last thing she said to me before she died, other than
I love you
, was:
Please, Alex, watch over your brother
.

By the time Simon finished seminary, it looked as if he might not need the watching. He was asked to become a Vatican diplomat, an invitation that only ten Catholic priests, out of four hundred thousand in the world, receive each year. It meant studying at the most exclusive Church address outside Vatican walls—the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy. Six of the eight popes before John Paul were Vatican diplomats, and four were Academy men; so other than the Sistine Chapel during a conclave, no place on earth is likelier to house a future pope. If Simon remained in diplomatic service, the sky was the limit. All he needed to do was avoid giving away the family silverware.

Still, it seemed a surprising choice for my brother. There are two dozen departments in the Holy See bureaucracy, and if Simon had chosen a job at almost any other, he could've stayed at home. Everyone would've welcomed him at our father's old haunt, the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, or he could've made a statement by joining the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, which defends the rights of Eastern Catholics. Uncle Lucio, like most Vatican cardinals, had been given a few extra appointments outside his bailiwick, so he had suggestions of his own: the Congregation for the Clergy, or the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, where he could help nudge Simon up the ladder. And of all the reasons Simon had for turning down the Secretariat, the biggest was our family's history with its leader, the Vatican's second-­in-command, Cardinal Secretary of State Domenico Boia.

Boia came to office just as communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe. The Orthodox Church was reemerging after years of enforced atheism behind the Iron Curtain, and John Paul tried to offer it an olive
branch—only to find his new secretary of state standing in the way. Cardinal Boia mistrusted the Orthodox Church, which had split from Catholicism one thousand years ago in part because of disagreements over the pope's power. Orthodox consider the pope to be, like the nine patriarchs who lead their Church, a bishop worthy of special honor—first among equals—but not a superpower, not infallible. This seemed dangerously radical to Boia. So began a silent struggle in which the second-most powerful man at the Vatican tried to save the pope from his own good intentions.

His Eminence began a campaign of diplomatic snubs against the Orthodox that would set back relations by years. One of his most ardent helpers was an American priest named Michael Black, who had once been my father's protégé. In Simon's eyes, no department could have embodied hostility toward our father's ideals more than the Secretariat. Yet instead of refusing the invitation, he seemed to take it as a sign. God wanted him to take up our father's work of trying to reunite the Churches. And the Secretariat was where He wanted it done.

At the Academy, while other men studied Spanish or English or Portuguese, Simon studied the Slavic languages of Orthodoxy. He turned down Washington so that he could go to Sofia, capital of Orthodox Bulgaria. There, he bided his time until something came open in Ankara, the same nunciature where Michael Black was now working.

I knew that Simon had taken up Father's old torch, but what he intended to do with it, I thought even he himself didn't know. Then, a week before I met Ugo for the first time, Uncle Lucio called.

“Alexander, were you aware that your brother has been missing work?”

I was not.

Lucio clicked his tongue. “He was reprimanded for disappearing without cause. And since he won't talk to
me
about it, I'd appreciate it if
you
would find out why.”

Simon's excuse was office politics: Michael Black had reported him, out of spite. A week later, though, my brother was unexpectedly in Rome.

“I'm here with a friend,” he said.

“What friend?”

“His name's Ugo. We met in Turkey. Come have dinner with us at his place tonight. He'd like to meet you.”

NEVER IN MY LIFE
had I been to an apartment like Ugolino Nogara's. Most families who work for the pope rent Church-owned apartments around Rome. My parents, with Lucio's help, had been lucky to win a flat inside the walls, in the employee ghetto. But here, before my eyes, was how the other half lived. Nogara's apartment was inside the papal palace, right at the corner where the Vatican Museums met the Vatican Library. When Simon answered the door, Peter ran eagerly into his uncle's arms, but my eyes drifted into the vast space behind them. There were no frescoes on the walls, or ceilings worked with gold, but from front to back the apartment ran so far that screens had been put up to divide it into smaller rooms, the way cardinals once did at conclaves. The west wall had a view of the courtyard where scholars from the Vatican Library sipped drinks at a secluded café. To the south, where the crown of trees parted, the rooftops made a path straight to the dome of Saint Peter's.

From deep inside the apartment came a boisterous voice.

“Aha! You must be Father Alex and Peter! Come in, come in!”

A man came loping at us, arms outstretched. At first sight of him, Peter tucked himself into the protective recess of my legs.

Ugolino Nogara had the dimensions of a small bear, with skin so sunburned that it seemed phosphorescent. His eyeglasses were held together with a thick knot of tape. In his hand sloshed a glass of wine, and after he kissed me on each cheek, the first thing he said was, “Let me get you a drink.”

Those would be telling words.

Simon tenderly took Peter by the hand and spirited him away, offering him a gift from Turkey. I found myself alone with our host.

“You work at the nunciature with my brother, Doctor Nogara?” I asked while he poured.

“Oh, no,” he said with a laugh. He pointed to the building across the courtyard. “I work at the museums. I've just been in Turkey to put the last touches on my exhibit.”

“Your exhibit?”

“The one that opens in August.”

He winked, as if Simon had surely told me. But in those days, no one knew yet. Rumors hadn't circulated about the black-tie opening night, the reception in the Sistine Chapel.

“So how did you meet?” I asked.

Nogara loosened his tie. “Some Turks discovered a poor fellow in the desert, passed out with heatstroke.” He pulled off his eyeglasses to show me the tape. “Facedown.”

“They found Ugo's Vatican passport,” Simon called out, beginning to drift back, “so they phoned me at the nunciature. I had to drive four hundred miles to find him. He was in a city called Urfa.”

Peter, detecting adult conversation, slumped into a corner, staring foggily at the Attila the Hun comic book Simon had brought him from Ankara.

Nogara's face came alive. “Father Alex, imagine it. I was in a Muslim desert, and your brother, God bless him, arrived at my hospital bed in full cassock, with a basket of dinner and a bottle of Barolo!”

I noticed Simon didn't smile. “I didn't realize alcohol was the worst thing for sunstroke. Though someone else
did
know that.”

“I could not inform him,” Nogara said with a grin, “because after a few glasses of that Barolo, I had passed out.”

Humorlessly, my brother rubbed the rim of his glass. A thought began to gnaw at me. An explanation for what I was seeing. Nogara was a curator, which meant he had a special incentive for befriending Simon. His superior was the director of the museums, who answered to Uncle Lucio. Access to Lucio could explain how Nogara had landed an apartment like this.

“So what were you doing out there in the desert,” I said, “when you have such a beautiful place here? Peter and I would kill for a flat like this.”

The more closely I looked, though, the odder the apartment seemed. The kitchen was nothing but a portable refrigerator, a pair of hot plates, and a jug of bottled water. A clothesline was hung across the room, but I saw no sink or machine to do the wash. It felt improvised, as if he'd just moved in. As if friendship with Simon was paying dividends more quickly than he'd expected.

“I'll tell you a secret,” Nogara said. “They gave me the space up here because of my exhibit. And my exhibit is the reason I asked your brother to invite
you
here tonight.”

A buzzer sounded, and he turned to check the food cooking on the hot plates. I glanced at Simon, but he avoided my eyes.

“Now,” Nogara said, and a sly look crept across his face, “allow me to set the stage.” He lifted his wooden spoon like a conductor's baton. “I want you to imagine the most popular museum exhibit in the world. Last year, that exhibit was a Leonardo show in New York. Seven thousand people visited it on an average day. Seven
thousand
—a small town, moving through those galleries every twenty-four hours.” Nogara stopped theatrically. “Now, Father, imagine something bigger. Much bigger. Because my exhibit is going to
double
that.”