The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [5]
The doctors and nurses were working frantically to save his life, but all the monitors had flatlined.
One of the doctors moved forward and prepared to give Bartholomew a cardiac shock with a defibrillator.
On the second try, Bartholomew felt himself jolted back in his body.
He was alive once more, gasping for breath.
Back in his body, the pain was overwhelming.
Quietly he slipped from consciousness as the doctors and nurses frantically resumed their efforts to save his life.
CHAPTER TWO
Three Years Later
St. Joseph’s Church, New York City
Thursday, Day 1
Father Bartholomew was back at St. Joseph’s Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he had returned to serve as pastor after three hard years of hospitalization and rehabilitation. He spent one year bedridden, followed by another year in a wheelchair. The final year he learned to walk with leg braces and crutches before he gained enough strength to walk again on his own power. Steel pins and rods that had been inserted in more operations than he could recall held together the multiple broken bones throughout his body. Truly his body would never be the same, but he felt God’s grace had been abundant. The doctors advised him that the pain from the car accident would never entirely leave him. Still, he thanked God that he had lived and he was overwhelmed with joy that he had recovered enough to return to his duties as a parish priest.
This Thursday, Father Bartholomew was saying Mass at the central altar under the dome of the venerable church. He enjoyed wearing the vestments, the long formal robes the priest wore when celebrating Mass—the alb, the thin tunic worn by priests since antiquity; the chasuble, the stiff outer mantle with its Latin cross embroidered on front and back, and special colors for each part of the church liturgy. The vestments might seem medieval to the iPod generation, but to Father Bartholomew the formal priestly garments worn to celebrate Mass were essential to conveying the solemnity he felt the Mass was intended to create: a community of worshippers brought together to celebrate Christ’s life, death, and perpetual resurrection.
Always, Father Bartholomew felt moved as he approached the consecration of the bread and wine, the most holy part of the Mass. Ever since being ordained, Bartholomew never got over the awe of the mystical power he had been given to transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The memory of having seen with his own eyes Christ’s passion and death continued to haunt him. How great was God’s love for us to have allowed his only Son to die on the cross for our sins? The sight of the nails driven through Christ’s flesh had become the constant theme of his quiet prayer and meditation.
In this era of the Internet and big-screen TVs, the number of true believers in Christianity had diminished, but Bartholomew’s faith had never wavered. Having been given the grace to return among the living after the dreadful accident that had nearly cost him his life, Bartholomew counted every day as a blessing God had personally bestowed upon him.
Slowly, he genuflected and raised the host above his head. “Behold the body of Christ,” he told the assembled congregation.
This he had done hundreds of time, so many he could not count. But today it was different. As he held the host between the thumb and forefingers of each hand and raised the host upward with both his arms elevated, he felt a sudden violent shock pound at his right wrist. The pain was immediate. Looking up, he saw what he perceived to be blood trickling down his arm.
HIS MIND SUDDENLY tripped, ripping him from the here and now of the central altar of St. Joseph’s Church in New York City to a distant time and place. Here, in a distant place separated from New York City by countless miles and what felt like thousands of years, he found himself stripped naked, lying flat on the ground, atop what seemed to be a long board. Though it made no sense at all, a Roman centurion was holding down