The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [14]
Castle took in the information, but from what he was reading in the medical file, the case was not remarkable. Father Bartholomew had been revived after the doctors in the operating room applied cardiac electric shock procedures. A lot of people die for a while on the operating table and revive back to life, Castle thought. So what? That Morelli thought otherwise was all Castle needed to hear to understand not only that Morelli had no professional medical training, but also that Morelli had very little understanding of medicine.
“You might not realize it, Father Morelli, but it’s not all that unusual for a patient’s heart to come back like that,” Castle said as he calmly perused the medical file. “For many patients, the cardiac electric shock works. That’s why the doctors in the operating room applied the procedure.”
“I understand,” Morelli said, undeterred. “But there’s more. Father Bartholomew reported to his religious superiors in the archdiocese that he experienced an out-of-body experience on the operating table. When he was aware his heart had stopped, he felt himself lifting out of his body and hovering above the scene of the doctors below working frantically to revive him. Next, he says, a brilliant light surrounded him and he went through a tunnel he saw suspended high in the air above him. At the end of the tunnel, he recognized many friends and relatives who had died years before. Finally, he was reunited with his mother, who had died only a few years earlier, after a long illness.”
Again Bartholomew was not sure there was anything remarkable about this. In the medical profession, these were considered “near-death” experiences, not “after-life” experiences, despite how much Father Morelli or the Catholic Church might protest the difference. As far as Dr. Castle was concerned, in his professional medical judgment, people who are truly dead do not return to life. People who are near death may have experiences that they interpret as if they had died and returned to life. But to Castle, this important distinction needed to be made. Just because some people reported this experience did not mean the experience of dying and returning to life happened as they thought. As far as the psychiatrist was concerned, no truly dead person had ever returned to life to report on what happens after we die.
“People who go through near-death experiences commonly report seeing brilliant lights or going through tunnels at the end of which are waiting long-deceased friends and relatives,” Castle explained. “All this is explainable from natural causes, from the physiology of how the brain dies. It doesn’t mean a person going through a near-death experience is really floating as a disconnected spirit that hovers above their body lying dead below, or that they actually enter a tunnel where they meet long-lost acquaintances. Near-death experiences do not prove the continued existence of the soul after death, nor do they confirm the existence of Heaven. Medically speaking, near-death experiences do not prove the person has actually died, even if the person thinks that is the case. More precisely, near-death experiences tell us how the brain shuts down right before the brain dies.”
Morelli seemed to get the point, so Castle continued.
“That seems to be what happened to Father Bartholomew. In the cases where people appear to come back to life, maybe the heart has stopped, but the brain doesn’t die. I will admit that medical science does not understand the phenomenon completely. But a patient who revives from a near-death experience did not actually die. That must be accepted. Again, we don’t always understand why, but some patients can be technically dead for several minutes, even longer, yet for some reason or other, when their