The Apocalypse of Selfishness and The Shroud of Turin

“When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, 'There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and lowering.' You know then how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”
	Matthew 16:2-4

It is my premise  that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus, called Christ, and that it offers evidence that supports the claim of his resurrection within three days of his crucifixion. The scientific examination of the Shroud began with the Secondo Pia photographs in 1898. Until then,  the facts concerning the death and purported Resurrection were essentially matters of faith drawing on the four Gospels accounts, the Epistles of Christ’s apostles and oral traditions of cloudy provenance. There were even those who claimed that Christ never existed at all. Science has now provided a rock of fact to which believers may cling. But so what?

Here’s what: Humanity now faces an apocalyptical extinction as a species. Revelations and other apocalyptical writings have been until now mystical allegories and metaphors. But science is not prophesying in metaphors or allegories ‑ its prophecies of doom are based on hard facts.

The Apocalypse that threatens us is an apocalypse of selfishness. The heedless exploitation of our environment has resulted in multiple crises that demand immediate, concerted international cooperation and action, but the very apostles of selfishness that are driving humanity to the brink of extinction bar our way.

For prophecy of an apocalypse, let us turn to the current Roman Catholic Pope.

“Small yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples.
	Pope Francis ¶216 Evangelii Gaudium

Despite some criticisms from conservative elements in the Church, Francis has not retreated from his elevation of the environment to a religious issue. On May 21, 2014, Pope Francis told an audience; “If we destroy creation, creation will destroy us.”

Is Francis right? Was his statement hyperbole or prophecy? Creation destroying us! Is he prophesying an Apocalypse?

A Blessed Christmas from Boris Pasternak.

When I first read Doctor Zhivago I was struck by the power of its underlying theme: that Christianity transfigured human existence to the divine by reason of the birth, life and death of the God made man, Jesus Christ. That the great mysteries of Christianity were the elements of everyone's life. A child is conceived and born. We eat bread and drink wine. We suffer and we die. By reason of Christ's divinity each one of these mundane facts of life are rendered divine.

Nothing expressed the thought better than Zvivago's contemplation of his wife's pregnancy. The babe referred to is masculine, but the sentiment applies to every man and woman of woman born.

“The mother of God is asked to ‘pray zealously to her son and her God,’ and the words of the Psalm are put into her mouth: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold from henceforth all generation shall call me blessed.’ It is because of her child that she says this, He will magnify her (‘For he that is mighty hath done to me great things’): He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men - it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later."

Merry Christmas.
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This is not a promo for my book "Quantum Christ" but if you are interested:

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html

Two Popes and a Priest: Someone's let the Holy Spirit get loose

I have never been deep into the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Since I was taught as a child that nobody including St. Augustine could understand it, I really haven't tried. But some times, I get this feeling like this morning that someone has set him lose. Bill O'Reilly claims he was moved by the Holy Spirit to write his new book "Killing Jesus" which I understand pictures Jesus among other things leading a tax revolt against the Romans. That's not quite the way I read scripture. It was the money changers in the Temple (a veritable free market) that most caught Christ's ire. O'Reilly stands to make millions from his book. Perhaps he's mixed-up about what kind of spirit actually motivates him.

Every morning when I arise whether it's at 5:00AM, yesterday (after 4.5 hours sleep) or at 5:45AM today after 6.45 hours sleep (Can't stand Bill Maher much and Alex Baldwin (who I met once) is not my cup of tea) and check my E-Mail. Among other things I am on an E-Mail alert from the NY Times for articles on the Catholic Church. Today, was a humdinger. One of the articles I can not help but comment (Church to poll Catholics on attitudes on social Issues such as contraception, abortion and gay rights) and the other matter suggested by that is an immodest proposal: Sainthood for two deserving clerics: (And a little thanksgiving for a third soon to be canonized) .

I know to non-Catholics and  ex-Catholics, the whole  sainthood thing is a bit too much and, particularly when it comes to the recent trend of clerical canonizations (i.e. Pope John Paul II).a bit overdone. I guess I who is belligerently remaining in the Church would agree. In fact I just wrote it (supra).

The late Father Robert Poveromo who passed away last year was close to our family, particularly my late son Michael. In fact in one of our last conversation, Mike told me that Father Poveromo had agreed to be is personal confessor. I remarked to “Father Bob” that I felt that the greatest of saints since the time of the Apostles was St. Francis and he responded “Some of us think he was the only saint.

It was with some satisfaction that I noted the intent of POPE Francis to join the canonization of Pope John XXIII with that of John Paul II, his half namesake, half in name only, Now maybe, it’s time to get into the game for I propose the beatification of two clerics: Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti (Pope Pius XI) and Fr. Peter Rinaldi, either of which could rightfully (if not jointly) be called “Patron Saint of the Holy Shroud.

This is not a place to begin a long conversation about the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. I believe the evidence is convincing to the  near beyond reasonable doubt plateau. I say that as a lawyer who has just won a substantial jury verdict for a client where I had to grapple with issues like circumstantial evidence. Peter, Achille and  John and John pray for my client (and me) that survives an appeal. If it is the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, it is the most important object on the face of the earth.

Pius XI, the Shroud of Turin and the Jews

There are two outstanding accomplishments of Pius XI that argue for his sagacity, if not his sanctity. Let’s take the Shroud first. As a young man, Achille had climbed the Alps with  with another young adventurer, Paul Vignon. Vignon suffered a physical and nervous breakdown. While recuperating who took of painting and later worked as a assistant to the famous French biologist Yves Delage. Delage asked Vignon to investigate the authenticity of  the Pia photographs and the rest is history (covered in my manuscript in Chapters Five (Maelstrom) and Six (Resurrection of the Shroud).

It was as Pius XI, that he requested the 1933 exposition of the Shroud and it was at that exhibition a young Turinese seminarian, Peter Rinaldi encountered both Paul Vignon and future giant of Shroud studies Pierre Barbet.

Perhaps Pius XI most acclaimed act occurred during his dying days in 1938 when working with an American Jesuit priest he prepared an encyclical denouncing the Nazi’s for the their incipient Jewish pogrom and the neo-paganism which they represented. His secretary of state of Cardinal Pacelli who became Pius XII was not pleased. He has been also proposed for sainthood by Vatican clerics but since I can not say anything good about him, I’ll remain silent.

Peter Rinaldi after graduating from the seminary came to America. He publicized the Shroud in an article  published in US Sign Magazine while he was  still in seminary. His article created a firestorm of interest in the United States and led directly to the formation of the Hold Shroud Guild in the US. I will simply state that without Rinaldi’s tireless leadership and encouragement there might not have been a film Silent Witness and there certainly would not have been a STURP scientific investigation of the Shroud in 1978. It was his unique position as a priest in the US with connections in Turin that was instrumental but most instrumental perhaps was his gift for finding funds to finance both the STURP and Silent Witness.

I don’t think that I need add anything about John XXIII, he’s going to be canonized.

While your about if you are so inclined say a prayer for Rev. Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman charged with explaining Pope Francis while  he stays on the same page as Pope Francis. That’s a tough job. Compared his charge, the toughest jobs in the US (President and Mayor of NYC) are a walk in the [Central] park.

His most recent exercise was explaining that the Francis’ call for a poll on the attitudes towards controversial social issues wasn’t a big deal. Lombardi tried to downplay its importance. He didn’t do too well.

Let’s lift a glass to the late John Cardinal O’Connor

As some who was critical about Cardinal John O’Connor’s intervention in the 1984 Presidential election, I came to an understanding of him that was almost, but not quite admiration. A couple of things altered my opinion. First and foremost was his palpable and public outrage at the murder of three nuns and a lay worker by a right wing death squad in El Salvador. The Vatican ignored them, Cardinal O’Connor did not.

Then there was his attitudes toward Gay rights. What the Gay community never really understood was that O’Connor was not a free agent in the controversy, but had obligations to Rome that came with his office.

Two things stand out to me: one was the creation of the Terrance Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center on Fifth Avenue, across the avenue from Central Park. While the Center’s web cite now states a broader message, it was first and foremost when it was founded a health care center for AIDS patients. There were stories about O’Connor volunteering to do menial tasks at the center as an example of compassion for the afflicted.

That’s one plus. But there is another, the name of the Center. Cardinal Cooke was personal secretary to Cardinal Spellman who was a lion in the Church during his regime and the first to be labeled “the American Pope.” He was also a practicing homosexual. He used to spend weekends on Roy Cohn’s yacht. Cook’s reign as Cardinal was relatively short. He died in office of what was officially called “throat cancer.” Many believe it was  AIDS and I at first though there was irony in O’Connor’s naming the Church’s AIDS center for him.

I came to believe that I was wrong. O’Connor was a retired Navy Admiral, he didn’t do irony. As Cardinal, he would have been well-informed as to the true nature of Cooke’s condition.

Not only did O’Connor name the AIDS center for Cooke, he proposed Cooke for sainthood.

Today, there was a brief reminder of what a complex man O’Connor was in New York Times. The article concerns the fact that despite the huffing and puffing of current Cardinal Timothy Dolan about the “outrage” of Obamacare requiring Catholic hospitals to offer insurance plans that include contraception as a paid service, that for more three decades the New York Archdiocese hospitals have offered such insurance..

Who was the Catholic prelate who acquiesced to this outrage? Here’s what an Archdiocese spokesman told the times:

“Mr. Zwilling, the spokesman for the New York archdiocese, said that Cardinal John J. O’Connor and the archdiocese “objected to these services’ being included in the National Benefit Fund’s health insurance plan” when joining the league in the 1990s. But the cardinal then decided “there was no other option if the Catholic Church was to continue to provide health care to these union-affiliated employees in the city of New York,” Mr. Zwilling said.”

Further the deponent sayeth not.

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Pope Francis shows his grit

Like many in the US, I was disappointed that the Vatican is continuing its efforts to reign in American nuns. Then, I learned today something that to me, is startling, inspiring, edifying and maybe a little stunning. The Vatican is proceeding with the possible beatification of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador who was executed by a right wing death squad while saying Mass in 1980. Previously, the beatification process had been blocked. http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/francis-unblocks-romero-beatification-official-says

To me, there could be no greater indictment of the Vatican than a perceived indifference, if not open hostility, to the Catholic martyrs of Central America in the 1980s. They included six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and the housekeeper’s child. Then there were the four women, three nuns and lay health worker who brutally kidnapped, beaten, raped and then murdered by the El Salvador National Guard.

There was a report that when Benedict XVIth visited Central America and at the edge of the crowd some demonstrators for the martyrs sought his attention, he was told by his local escorts to pay them no mind, they were “communists.”

Although there were some reasons to be optimistic about Pope Francis, there were also some qualms. He had been an outspoken  opponent of “liberation theology” for example. The pronouncement on the American nuns was not a promising sign.

However, whatever his reservations about liberation theology, this development augurs well. It is no small thing and I expect the reactionaries will soon be at open war on his papacy.

If you believe in prayer, pray for him. And if you don’t believe in prayer, at least cross your fingers.

Palm Sunday, March 24, 2013: Christ, Kennedy and Lincoln

For the past two years we have been celebrating day by day the 150th anniversary of events in the Civil War. This year is  huge. There is the horrific Union loss at Chancellorsville followed by the turning point victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July, followed by the Gettysburg address at which Lincoln  redefined our  Nation, turning us toward the fundamental values of the Declaration of Independence.

This is also the fiftieth anniversary of two events of the JFK presidency. The first was the June speech at American University in DC where he first publicly proposed a ban on the atmospheric testing of Atomic weapons. Both he and Khrushchev had looked into the abyss the previous year during the Cuban Missile Crisis and knew the desperate path the World was trodding toward nuclear annihilation.

Kennedy's speech is best remembered by this phrase about the need for US-Soviet cooperation:

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Kennedy lost the White House on November 22, 1963. There is substantial evidence that he did plan to pull of Vietnam after the 1964 election and already had drafted an order to pull back our commitment. All that ended in Dallas, His successor gave the military-industrial complex the war it wanted.

Lincoln finally won his war in 1865. He visited vanquished Richmond but a week later he too was assassinated.

I have come to believe the enduring truth of the Christian faith (or myth, if that suits you) is not the resurrection but its transfiguring of all human experience into the divine. Lincoln and Kennedy both enjoyed great triumphs before their assassins struck. The cheers in Dallas were still ringing in JFK’s ears when all went black.

Today is Palm Sunday when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of an donkey. Cheers were ringing also in his ears. Then came the crucifixion and three days of black for his disciples. And then came Easter morning and the witness of Mary Magdalene that some thing  marvelous had happened.

Today is Palm Sunday and we can not forget even as we celebrate that Good Friday lies only five days in the future. But then two days more and it is Easter.

I close with a quotation from Elaine Pagels, author of the Gnostic Gospels:

“In its portrait of Christ’s life and his passion, orthodox teaching offered a means of interpreting fundamental elements of human experience. Rejecting the gnostic view that Jesus was a spiritual being, the orthodox insisted that he, like the rest of humanity, was born, lived in a family, became hungry and tired, ate and drank wine, suffered and died. They even went so far as to insist that he rose bodily from the dead. Here again, as we have seen, orthodox tradition implicitly affirms bodily experience as the central fact of human life. What one does physically—one eats and drinks, engages in sexual life or avoids it, saves one’s life or gives it up—all are vital elements in one’s religious development. But those gnostics who regarded the essential part of every person as the “inner spirit” dismissed such physical experience, pleasurable or painful, as a distraction from spiritual reality—indeed, as an illusion. No wonder, then, that far more people identified with the orthodox portrait than with the “bodiless spirit” of gnostic tradition. Not only the martyrs, but all Christians who have suffered for 2,000 years, who have feared and faced death, have found their experience validated in the story of the human Jesus.”[i]

We in this generation are blessed with a new revelation. His Shroud which not only registers the fact of His crucifixion, but whispers the hope of his Resurrection, and ours.

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[i] Pagels, Elaine (2004-06-29). The Gnostic Gospels (p. 99). Random House. Kindle Edition.

The image on the Turin Shroud: Is a laser like light the explanation?

There is debate among individuals who study the Shroud of Turin as to whether or not the image of a crucified man that appears on it is a scorch. I think one of the problems when discussing the scorch theory is defining a scorch. In common parlance, perhaps all of parlance, a scorch is the result of extreme heat. However,  pure light can have effects that mimic a scorch when it ages something - as it can do. 

Most of the arguments against a "scorch" theory involve the fact that has conventionally understood a scorch is caused by intense heat. Thus there are real scorch marks cause by the fire in the sixteenth century. The intriguing point was the finding of the Gilberts who examined the Shroud in 1978, that spectra of the Shroud image was identical to the spectra of the lightest parts of the scorch.

In the past two years, I have had cataracts removed from each of my eyes (I have only two, alas). My eyesight has been vastly improved, particularly my night vision. The tool used by the surgeon was not a scalpel but a laser. There was no subsidiary damage caused by the laser. 

The term laser is an acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." If a laser, which is pure light, can be modulated enough to remove tissue from an eye and cause no collateral damage, then the possibility that a laser like light could provide a process that would have "scorched" an image unto the Shroud ought to be considered until another proven method is demonstrated. 

The detail of the image is probably not as fine as the laser that removed my cataracts, or it may be finer. But my cataract removal indicates that a laser can function in very finite spaces and effect human tissue with no collateral damage.

Of course that didn't have lasers circa the 30 CE (AD) or later in 1350. I have a "simple" proposition. There are no scientifically supporter theories of the "method" of transfer of the image to the cloth. Any explanation of forger is very complex and actually so far as we have come, impossible. Thomas de Wesellow  claims that Christ's post-Resurrection appearances were all  expositions of the Shroud. He offers no convincing explanation of image formation. 

Applying Occam's razor, could it be that the "simplest explanation" of the image is in fact the Resurrection? 

The story of Genesis in the first book of the Bible and the introduction to the Gospel of St. John all revolve around light. Could it be that these stories, while not history have in fact a seemingly incredible insight: "And god said, let there be light and there was light." Christ is the alpha and the omega. Light was the Alpha, is his Resurrection and perhaps our own, the Omega.