Fr. Simon must’ve told Fr. Alex the news. They both refuse to answer me. I’m all alone now. I suppose they’re happy to have the exhibit end with the Crusades.
Nothing is written in the diary after these words. The pages are blank. But that final word—Crusades—is enough. In the context of the Diatessaron, I can think of only one thing it might mean.
The Shroud appeared in western Europe for the first time right after the Crusades, surfacing inexplicably in medieval France. Where had it come from? The answer was right under Ugo’s nose: Edessa. The city he believed, from the beginning, the Shroud and Diatessaron had both called home. For centuries, Eastern Christians and Muslims had battled over control of Edessa—but at the end of the First Crusade, something unprecedented happened: the city fell into the hands of Catholic knights from the West. Edessa became Christianity’s first crusader state. The experiment lasted less than fifty years before Muslims retook it, but in the meantime those Catholic knights would’ve packed up everything valuable and sent it home—which means the Diatessaron and the Shroud might’ve been shipmates on the trip west. If Ugo found records of the Diatessaron’s arrival in our library, then he might’ve found records of a relic that came west in the same shipment. In which case, the explanation for the Shroud’s sudden appearance in medieval France would be tidy: it came back from Edessa during the Crusades.
Yet even as I feel the thrill of this possibility—an elegant solution to one of the cloth’s most puzzling mysteries—something inside me rattles. A new and darker problem, which Ugo may not even have understood when he made his discovery.
If he was able to prove that the Shroud came west after the Crusades, then he was stepping onto an ancient religious battlefield. Catholics and Orthodox were united back when Muslims first took Edessa from Christendom—but by the Crusades we had split. This means we lost the Shroud together, but the knights who retook Edessa were Catholic, so the Shroud ended up in Catholic France. The Orthodox claim to ownership of the Shroud is just as strong as ours—yet the Orthodox ended up with nothing.
This is the first time since Ugo died that I feel the reason for his death might be devastatingly familiar. Relics are a flashpoint in Church relations. John Paul has tried to placate the Orthodox more than once by returning saints’ bones that Catholics allegedly stole. But if I’m right about Ugo’s discovery, then it could’ve created a custody battle around our greatest relic and fed the long-standing Orthodox grudge that Catholics are bullies, that we go where we don’t belong and take what isn’t ours. The missionaries who converted Orthodox into Eastern Catholics were only following in the footsteps of these Crusaders who brought home the Shroud and Diatessaron—all of them just tentacles of the great, hungry mouth that is Rome. Some Catholics would certainly have opposed publicizing a discovery like this. Especially mounting it in the pope’s museums.
Maybe there was a reason Ugo told me a very different story: he claimed the Diatessaron came to the Vatican from a collection of cursed manuscripts in an Egyptian monastery. I wonder now if that tale—like the one about his first meeting with Simon in the desert—was meant to keep me at arm’s length, off the scent of a difficult truth he wasn’t sure I could accept.
I close Ugo’s diary and fold it into my cassock. Down in the small hotel courtyard, an Eastern Catholic priest is sitting alone on a bench. Three Roman priests bustle past in conversation, paying him no more attention than the potted plants. I watch him for a moment, then close the window. Remembering the way Ugo’s apartment was broken into, I lock the shutters. I turn on Radio Uno for the rebroadcast of yesterday’s Supercoppa soccer match. Then, wedging myself into the toothpick of space Peter has left on one side of the bed, I close my eyes and listen, trying to drift away on the current of familiar voices and rhythms. Trying to pacify the feeling that everything is suddenly foreign. That, in my own home, I have become a stranger in a strange land.
IN THE BLACK OF night, I’m wakened by screaming.
Peter is rigid. Upright. Staring at something in the darkness.