No public announcement was ever made about the Diatessaron, because Ugo lobbied hard against one. But forty-eight hours after our meeting with my uncle, an article appeared in a Rome paper: FIFTH GOSPEL DISCOVERED IN VATICAN LIBRARY. The following Friday, three dailies picked up the story. That weekend, our discovery ran above the fold in La Repubblica. That was when the TV networks started calling.
Priests underestimate the appetite of laymen for cheap thrills about Jesus. Most of us roll our eyes at the prospect of new gospels. Every cave in Israel seems to contain one, and most turn out to have been written centuries after Christ by little sects of Christian heretics, or else forged for the publicity. But the Diatessaron was different. Here was a headline the Church could get behind. A legitimate and famous text, discovered in an extremely ancient manuscript, preserved thanks to the popes’ centuries-long devotion to books. Lucio had foreseen that it was a story everyone inside the walls would want to tell. So he made sure no one but Ugo could tell it.
Someone in John Paul’s apartments must’ve rubber-stamped Lucio’s decision to give custody of the Diatessaron to Ugo, because the whole arrangement made the Cardinal Librarian furious. Ugo hid the manuscript under lock and key in the restoration laboratory, where a team of conservationists under his command started removing the mysterious smudges. Thus the one book everyone wanted to know about, no one was allowed to see. Library staff went off the record with reporters to complain that the book might not even exist; the whole thing might be a stunt. Ugo, in retaliation, released a photo of the manuscript. Experts quickly studied the style of penmanship and declared it authentic. The major European dailies reprinted the photo, and now the questions intensified.
The attention scared Ugo. He knew the Diatessaron might be the keystone of his Shroud authentication, one of the pillars of his exhibit. But now it was threatening to become the exhibit. The Shroud had waited sixteen years for redemption and was now being overshadowed by its supporting cast. Wishing he had kept as mum about the Diatessaron as he had about the rest of his exhibit, Ugo decided to correct that mistake. From now on, he would stonewall. He would choke the flame. It must have seemed reasonable at the time, but he had forgotten that nothing fans a religious delirium quite like Vatican silence.
Peter and I, walking the streets of Rome over the summer, heard laymen discussing the Diatessaron. Was it right for the Vatican to withhold information? Didn’t the patrimony of Christianity belong to all of us? What needed hiding, anyway? Headlines in leftist tabloids seized on the opportunity. They wheeled out the usual conspiracy theories in the guise of proposing what the Diatessaron’s secret might be. Jesus was a married man. A gay man. A woman. One professor at a secular university was quoted as saying that the Diatessaron failed to report that Jesus was ever seen again after his death. Later the professor clarified that he was talking about the gospel of Mark, not the Diatessaron, since early manuscripts of Mark do indeed fail to report this.
Day by day the hubbub grew. Finally a panel of forty Bible scholars wrote an open letter to John Paul, calling for the manuscript to be studied. And so it came to pass that Uncle Lucio, having dealt the cards, now played his ace. In response to public pressure, he announced, the Diatessaron would be publicly displayed for the first time—at Ugo’s exhibit. Overnight, advance ticket sales quadrupled.
Ugo was beside himself. I told him there was no shame in letting a new gospel share the pedestal with the Shroud—after all, they were ancient brothers, both leading us back to first-century Jerusalem. But I’d let my enthusiasm for the Diatessaron carry me away. Ugo was irate. He growled that the Diatessaron was not a new gospel and that I obviously didn’t understand his exhibit’s duty not just to redeem the Shroud but to show the world where it belonged in the pecking order of ancient Christian testimony. “The gospels weren’t written by Jesus,” he snapped. “They aren’t Christ’s testimony about Himself. Only the Shroud holds that honor. So if every church on earth has a copy of the gospels, then every church on earth should have an image of the Shroud, and that image should be revered above the gospels. I’m surprised at you, Father Alex. It’s an insult to God to let a second-class gospel—a man-made thing—be celebrated on par with our Lord’s gift.”