Immaculate Misconception



  Immaculate Misconception

  By Mark D. Stucky

  Copyright 2010 Mark D. Stucky

  Immaculate Misconception

  By Mark D. Stucky

  "Christ looks grotesque," Father Aaron Albedo muttered to himself as he paused before the sacristy's "restored" painting of the crucifixion. The retouched paint made Christ's agonized face look like that of a gargoyle. Because the poor congregation could not afford professional restoration of the old, flaking, dirt-laden painting, an amateur painter in the parish had donated his labor. "His intentions were honorable, his price was unbeatable, but his skills were lamentable," the priest whispered. "Lord, forgive us for the blunders we make in faith."

  Father Albedo noticed his own blunder as he was leaving the sacristy. He had forgotten to wash out the purificator cloths from the morning mass. They lay beside the sacrarium sink with traces of blood-red wine staining the white linen.

  He trudged back to the sink, put the stopper in the drain, placed the cloths under the faucet, and turned on the water. While waiting for the soapy water to cover the cloths, he glanced at the cross-shaped hologram projector on the wall behind the sink. Motion sensors detected his gaze, and full-color, three-dimensional scenes of the stations of the cross began projecting into the air above the sink. The projector played each of the 14 scenes with a user-selectable rate and choice of background music. The passion scenes started with Jesus being sentenced to death and ended with him being wrapped in a burial shroud inside the tomb. The kitsch techno-crucifix on the old dilapidated plaster wall seemed anachronistic to Albedo, and he liked the holographic images no better than the botched oil painting. However, since the congregation had presented the stations-of-the-cross hologram to Albedo on his 60th birthday, he had felt obligated to hang it somewhere. He must at least appear to appreciate the gift.

  Albedo turned off the water. He would let the cloths soak until after confession.

  As Albedo passed the statue of the Mother of God and neared the confessional box, he noticed the sanctuary's main door open just a crack. An eye surreptitiously peeked around the frame. To maintain confession's privacy, the priest glanced down at the worn carpeting and entered the semi-darkness of the box.

  He sat on the wooden chair, slid the left panel aside, and intoned to the shadowy parishioner behind the screen, "Peace be unto you." The first person's confession was heart-felt and emotional, seemingly finding spiritual relief and nurture in the priest's words. The second person's confession was perfunctory and mechanical, apparently following a ritual recited since childhood to please a clockwork God.

  This contrast in passions reminded the priest of his own adult religious transformation. As a young priest he had felt an idealistic, fervent faith. But as the decades dragged by, the fire of his faith had dwindled to feeble embers. Like the second parishioner's emotional detachment, Albedo, too, now often went dutifully through the motions of his job while feeling tired, disillusioned, and defeated.

  Doubts gnawed at his mind. What did he have to show for all those decades of service? What difference had he made in the world? Did God really care about this church? Did faith really matter at all?

  The third voice from the booth made him forget his reverie. The unfamiliar voice seemed to be from an intelligent, educated, middle-aged male, and the voice contained submerged emotion that threatened to burst through the sophisticated veneer.

  "Father, I have never been to confession before because I am not Catholic, and I don't know the proper words to say."

  "That doesn't matter," the priest replied gently. "Just tell me what is on your heart."

  "I came to confess my guilt before I die. I have to tell someone my story even though I won't be believed. My guilt feels so overwhelming that I'm desperate for release. But I'm afraid even God cannot forgive me."

  "If you are truly repentant, God will forgive any confessed sin."

  "God has never had to forgive this sin before!"

  "What is your sin?"

  "It's a long story."

  "Go on."

  "To start at the beginning, twenty years ago, in 2013, I had the Shroud of Turin stolen."

  "Stolen?"

  Yes, I know what you are thinking--that the Shroud was never stolen. Oh, I assure you it really was. I paid mercenaries to steal it and deliver it to me. I held the Shroud in my own hands. The Turin officials, however, kept the disappearance quiet. They assumed it was being held for ransom, but they were wrong. I returned it anonymously a few weeks later as soon as I got what I needed from it.

  "I see." Father Albedo groped for words, "But...you returned it a few months later. You've carried your guilt a very long time, but your repentance twenty years ago could have found grace."

  "Father, that's not what I came to confess. I never intended to hold the Shroud for ransom as was popularly believed. I just needed to borrow it. The Turin officials, so leery of scientists, had refused me permission to examine it, and stealing it, unfortunately, was the only way to discover the final truth. I regret it now, but at the time I believed my cause to be just--even righteous. Father, do you believe the Shroud was the actual burial cloth of Christ?"

  "I'm uncertain. Many do believe, but faith should not rest on the Shroud's or any other relic's authenticity."

  "Authenticity, indeed, is the crucial question. The botched carbon dating performed in 1988 seemed to prove that the Shroud was not old enough to be genuine, but the samples were from a rewoven medieval patch on the edge of the cloth, which skewed the results."

  "Belief in the Shroud ultimately is a matter of faith more than of science."

  "How so, Father?"

  "Even if they had proved the Shroud to be two thousand years old, no scientist could prove it was the genuine burial cloth of Christ and not some other first-century crucified man. Science, unfortunately, seems able to only disprove matters of faith; it can never prove them."

  "Father, you are mistaken. I did prove the authenticity of the Shroud."

  "How is that possible?"

  "I'm a biochemist. When I became heir to my wealthy father's estate, I liquidated everything in order to form my own genetic engineering company. My company holds numerous patents, but the biggest project--my life's work--was secret.

  "I stole the Shroud to obtain specimens of the blood stains on the cloth. I needed the DNA found in the dried blood cells for cloning."

  "Cloning? You cloned the blood of Christ?"

  "More than that, Father. Remember, Father, mine was a nearly impossible quest. I wasn't sure the blood stains found on the Shroud were from Christ or from someone else. And even if they were genuine, I still sought a genetic needle in a haystack. DNA is fragile, decomposing over time. From the fragments of ancient DNA in the microscopic remains of white blood cells, I extracted the genetic information and sequenced the DNA. Then, in donated human egg cells, I replaced the DNA in the egg cell with the DNA from the Shroud. The egg cell functioned only as a host since the genetic blueprint came entirely from the Shroud blood.

  "After many failures I finally implanted a viable embryo into the womb of a volunteer, a young woman of 18, a virgin. Then we waited nine months for the birth.

  "Many things could have gone wrong. The science of cloning was still crude. The slightest chemical imbalance or gap in the DNA sequence could have caused abnormalities in the fetus. Even if a healthy baby was born, he might be just a clone of an ordinary executed Jewish thief or a clone of a medieval artist who used drops of his own blood to forge the Shroud.

  "The child, however, was a beautiful, healthy, apparently Semitic boy. We had passed the first hurdle, but to know the boy's identity with certainty would still take years.

  "I married the youn
g woman, and we, as a postmodern Mary and Joseph, raised the child as our own. As he grew older his extraordinary identity became obvious to us. His spell-binding charisma charmed everyone around him. His knowledge and foreknowledge surpassed any normal capacity. He began displaying miraculous powers over natural phenomena, healing with a touch and raising dead pets back to life.

  "I had my proof. Jesus of Nazareth had risen again--this time from a test tube. I wondered what I had wrought. Was this the Second Coming as foretold in the Bible? Did the consummation of the ages really eat breakfast and watch television in my home? Would the Bible need a sequel?

  "So, Father, now I've told you what I've dared tell no one else. Do you think I'm crazy?"

  "Your story is incredible," came the hesitant answer. "If it is true, why are you here? Exactly what have you come to confess?"

  "My story won't end well. My early perception of my son, the Son of Science, was not entirely correct. Yes, he was cloned from Jesus Christ, but the process was flawed. The original environment could never be perfectly duplicated. The second mother Mary had a different body chemistry than the original's. Perhaps the clone's chromosomes suffered a biochemical twitch, perhaps the milieu in the third millennium is less hospitable to messiahs than in the first, or perhaps the clone succumbed rather than resisted a wilderness temptation. For whatever reason, my cloned christ was subtly but horribly different from the original.

  "After he turned 13, I began noticing small irregularities. He always acted like the perfect child when other people were around, but when he thought he was unobserved, he began to rebel. If he had been a typical adolescent, such mischief would have been normal--but he was not a normal boy! As his hidden conduct worsened, I began to wonder if I had been mistaken. I wondered if he really was Christ...or something else.

  "His smooth public speech and miraculous powers enthralled many people, but secretly he perpetrated astonishingly sordid acts. I believe he molested some children in the neighborhood and erased their memories of it. Among many other atrocities, I believe he caused our neighbors' pets to become rabid and attack their owners. I watched him laugh as an ordinary cumulus cloud inexplicably transformed into a tornado that killed a dozen people. His lamb-like appearance concealed the heart of a wolf.

  "His mother became terrified of him. Tragically for her, she knew too much. One day while I was at my lab, she...she died in a gas explosion that leveled our house. The woman who had given him only love, our son burned to death!

  "That evening while I was identifying her body in the morgue, another fire destroyed my lab. It was no coincidence. My son caused both fires, but the police arrested me for arson and murder. I had no real defense. All my records of the experiment were destroyed, and had I told them the truth about my son, they would have locked me in an asylum for the rest of my life. Fortunately, I narrowly escaped conviction because no forensic evidence of arson was ever found.

  "That is not the end of my son's malevolence. His powers are still growing. He soon will have all the powers of God Incarnate, but instead of being good, he is evil.

  "His evil, ultimately, is my fault because I manipulated nature and gave him life. I came to confess that I unintentionally brought into the world the Antichrist. I am responsible for bringing his evil, and, therefore, I am responsible for eradicating his evil. In this one case, the end must surely justify the means. I must try to kill him. He will probably kill me during my attempt, but I still must try. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, and now I must go and sin once more."

  Then the priest heard the confessional door swing open and footsteps pound toward the exit. "Wait, my son!" Albedo rose and stumbled after the stranger. The priest ran past several startled parishioners kneeling in the pews. Albedo reached the main door only in time to see the stranger disappear into the evening shadows.

  Surely the man was insane, the priest thought, and the story was a delusion. Albedo had heard stories from many people haunted by the ghosts in their own minds. Or perhaps he was merely a prankster, trying to fool the old priest with a wild tale.

  But what if he was authentic? What if his story was true? What then?

  The priest suddenly shivered in the cold wind of nightfall. He felt as if the tremor traveled to his very heart, and this heart-quake seemed to fracture an ice-encrusted wall. He gasped and then wept as an intense sensation of warmth swept through his body. He felt his frigid faith abruptly rekindle its flame. He had always believed good must eventually triumph over evil, and if such evil really walked the earth, then a priest's mission was more vital now than ever.

  Requesting wisdom and strength, he whispered a quick, impassioned prayer toward the heavens. Then, returning inside to his remaining parishioners, he pulled the church door shut against the deepening darkness.

  # # #