The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [7]
CHAPTER THREE
Friday
Dr. Stephen Castle’s office, New York City
Day 2
What does the Vatican want with me? Dr. Stephen Castle had wondered when Archbishop Carl Duncan, an old friend, had called him from his office at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, asking for some of his time.
“His Holiness Pope John-Paul Peter I is sending a special envoy to New York and I’m recommending you are the man to see him,” Duncan had explained over the telephone on Friday. “This is an important case involving a priest in the archdiocese and we need to deal with it immediately.”
“What’s so important that the pope is sending an envoy from Rome, and why me, of all people?” Castle protested. “Surely you’ve got plenty of psychiatrists in Rome. Why not send the priest to Rome and have him analyzed out of the country, where the publicity about the case could be more easily controlled?”
Duncan sensed Castle’s hesitation. “We’ve worked together before and I need your help again,” he said, getting straight to why he called Castle this morning. “The pope trusts you and so do I.”
Castle appreciated what Duncan was saying. Castle liked Duncan personally, even though much of Castle’s international reputation was built on his atheism and his criticism of religion as a dangerous mass delusion that caused human beings to wage war and kill each other as infidels, just because their beliefs in God happened to be different. When Castle walked past St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City he frequently thought of the Crusades and wondered how anyone could ever kill another human being in the name of God. As Castle had argued in books and in interviews, religious wars were all the proof he needed that man had invented God, rather than the other way around.
Castle’s professional reputation went global after he wrote The God Illusion five years ago. In The God Illusion, Castle had taken Freud’s argument that religion was nothing more than a popular delusion that societies through time have created. But he asked why. Was it because societies need to give human beings an explanation for what has always been fundamentally unknowable about the human condition? Was it to answer the questions of where we human beings come from and where we are headed after death?
As Freud had done in Civilization and Its Discontents, Castle saw religion as nothing more than a mass neurosis imposed on people by society to control their otherwise disorderly sexual impulses. The problem to Freud was that religion imposes moral constraints of “right and wrong” in order to restrain artificially human impulses that are considered embarrassing or unattractive, such as sex. But Castle went one step further: in his book, he argued that religion not only produces sexual neuroses, it also divides people and causes wars, thereby producing additional neuroses and mass hatred. What is the point, he asked, of holy wars fought over the true God when the whole idea of God itself may be nothing more than a fiction people made up in the first place?
The psychiatrist had first worked with Duncan ten years earlier, when Duncan had been newly appointed archbishop. Castle and Duncan had met socially, at an Upper East Side cocktail party held by a wealthy Catholic donor to the church who was also one of Castle’s patients at the time. When the archdiocese was sued over alleged sexual abuses committed several decades ago by a few renegade priests, Duncan called Castle.
“Yes, I understand some of your priests have a fondness for boys,” Castle had told Duncan in their first private conference ten years ago. “What do you expect? The Catholic Church does not allow the clergy to marry. Yet the Church gives priests privileged access to advise boys and young men. Boys come to the priest’s attention every day when they serve as altar boys. You’ve got to understand that for a pedophile attracted to young boys, meeting a prepubescent altar boy for the first time is a lot like a heterosexual man being introduced to Megan Fox. Pedophiles get the