The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [100]
Listening to Fathers Middagh and Morelli grouse, Castle was convinced he was in the first stages of hearing the Vatican’s unofficial rebuttal, even though Castle was certain Pope John-Paul Peter I would never take any official position on the Shroud.
“How many times do we have to prove that the Shroud was not painted,” Morelli wondered. “Red ochre is an earth pigment that would have washed off when water was thrown on the Shroud in the 1532 fire. McCrone was an old fool who was the only member of the Shroud of Turin Research Project to think the Shroud was painted. That was his opinion going into the research project and that was the prejudice he held until he died.”
“Besides, there’s the issue of the blood on the Shroud blocking the formation of the image,” Middagh said. “How many times do we have to explain that there were two distinct steps in which the image was formed: first the blood was deposited by direct contact, then the body image was formed by a process nobody so far has explained satisfactorily. I’m sure all Gabrielli did was throw blood here and there on top of an image he already created. Look closely and I’m sure you will find a body image under the globs of blood Gabrielli painted on his shroud. If that’s what Gabrielli did, he missed an important point and his duplicate shroud will end up doing nothing to discredit the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin.”
When they landed in Rome, Morelli got a call from the Vatican.
“The Vatican says we should all rest up tonight,” Morelli told Castle.
“Why?” Castle wondered.
“The pope has chartered the plane for us once again tomorrow morning,” Morelli explained. “They have scheduled us a trip to Geneva. Seems there is a scientist at CERN the pope wants us to meet.”
“Are we invited?” Ferrar asked, not wanting to be excluded.
“Yes,” Morelli said, “and the pope suggests you will want to bring along your video crew. The Vatican has requested for you to videotape the interview.”
“Sounds good to me,” Ferrar said.
“One more thing,” Morelli said to Castle. “The pope wants Professor Gabrielli to go along. Do you think you can arrange that? The pope will schedule an airplane to take Gabrielli directly to Geneva and return him home at the conclusion of the day.”
“I don’t know,” Castle said, not entirely surprised at Pope John-Paul Peter I’s decision to include his chemist friend on the field trip to CERN. “I will telephone him and find out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Friday
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Day 23
The name CERN derived from the acronym in French for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research. CERN was formed in 1952 as a provisional body charged with building a world-class fundamental physics research organization in Europe. The guts of CERN were underground, consisting primarily of the Large Hadron Collider, a twenty-seven-kilometer-circumference circular tunnel built below the surface of the earth in the area between the Geneva airport and the Jura Mountains. CERN physicists use the Large Hadron Collider to smash protons together in an attempt to understand the “big bang,” which many modern physicists and astronomers believe was the origin of the universe.
Within minutes of Dr. Castle’s arrival from Rome, a limo delivered Professor Gabrielli from Bologna. Once the group was together, they were escorted down a central elevator to the office of Dr. Ruth Bucholtz, an internationally renowned particle physicist. In the past year, Dr. Bucholtz had the personal pleasure of presenting the results of her decade-long research on the Shroud of Turin to Pope John-Paul Peter I in a personal two-hour audience in the Vatican. In a conference room adjoining her office, Dr. Bucholtz set up the equipment she would need to demonstrate her conclusions about the Shroud.
Dr. Bucholtz greeted them with her thick German accent. Castle judged