The Lure
A persistent religious scandal in Luxembourg; the birth of Jesus as a fabrication of King Herod; the enduring saintly nature of the Biblical Magi; a bone pile is mined for holy relics...
I had one eye laid upon the heavens when Leunis made his appearance. He flung back the wooden door to the observatory, perhaps forgetting that is at least three centuries old, and fragile despite its thickness and its strap hinges that spread like a silhouette of ivy across the timbers. The lunar glow that immediately bathed a triangular section of the flagstone floor was at odds with the cultivated darkness of the room; the infusion of pale light illuminating pastel smudges of iron in the creased slabs of opaque sheet rock that are the antithesis of marble.
I raised my head from the eyepiece of the telescope. The moon-faded galaxy held captive under the lens receded into that well of darkness. I was about to castigate him for his interruption when I saw that he was breathless from running. I reasoned that he must have hurried up the hill-stairs behind the east end of the church. As he moved further into the light, I took note of the sticky mud buttressing his shoes. I realised that he had not reached me via the steps, but had come up the embankment, following an informal path that leads from the wood chapel, so-called because it was never consecrated and, under the instruction of my immediate predecessor, was repurposed as a lumber store.
“Whatever is the matter?” I asked him, fearing that my question might herald the announcement of a death; either one of our own within the confines of the abbey, or else a dignitary in the nearby town. Strange I thought that I had heard no bells ring.
There followed a few moments where the novice fought to marshal his ragged breathing. Finally, with as much formality as he could muster, he spoke:
“Pope Benedict XVI has resigned.”
I assumed that he had either misreported the news, or that I had misheard it. In my mind the Pope was dead.
“But why have there been no bells to mark his passing?”
Leunis stared back at me, baffled.
“But he is not dead,” he stammered. “He has resigned, citing age and poor health.”
“Of course,” I answered. “Forgive me. I misunderstood.”
Inwardly, I wondered what the public reaction might be to the news. The announcement had been made in the evening, allowing a few hours for a consensus to form among those who chose to remain awake. One might be tempted to affirm that it is the privilege of God alone to decide when his most holy vessel on Earth may lay down their burden. In my youth I might have joined this chorus of moral outrage. Now, as I approach my 80th birthday, a few months hence, I wonder for how much longer I will be able to remain in this position. With every passing year the work seems to get harder and the expectations placed upon our small community more numerous. More and more we are called upon to stretch ourselves in directions that are out of keeping with our core values and beliefs.
“Is there any word as yet of a likely successor?”
“Olinger has been mentioned.”
The reason for the young boy's haste now became more readily apparent.
“It won't be Olinger,” I said. “I understand he is our man and we would like to see him elevated to the Vatican.”
“But he is well-placed. He is liked, regarded as neither too moderate, nor too judgemental. In Africa and South America, he is thought of as a strong voice, unwavering in direction.”
“There is the other thing. Though he carries no blame for it, nonetheless it upsets the balance.”
“But that was resolved! If anything, he emerged from it stronger and more respected.”
“A thing like that is never resolved,” I counselled. “It festers and will eventually resurface in a more damaging form than before.”
While it is accurate to say that Tunn Olinger and I both attended the Rannerholz Theological College together, in this instance God is in very much embedded in the fine detail. I was many years Olinger's senior and was in the process of exiting the college as he arrived. I recall that we occasionally interacted with one another, though not enough for me to form a credible opinion of his character. As a prefect, I once issued him with a written warning after he repeatedly cut across a section of grass in preference over following the angled path around the Quarter Building. From this recollection, you may draw your own conclusions regarding his nature, and, if you must, my efficacy as an improver of young men.
After graduating, I retreated into the abbey at Äppelhang where I am presently Abbot. Olinger opted for a more political route into the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, eventually rising to the position of Bishop of Echternach.
His fifth year in the role was marred by an unfolding scandal that resisted all attempts to douse its fires. A woman Marta Claes turned up at the Cathedral claiming to have been visited by Saint Mary, who had told her that she was to bear the child of the Bishop. Their offspring would grow to become either a prophet or an earthbound angel of some kind – the exact details could never be nailed down and it is doubtful that even Claes knew. Nothing that anyone could say would dispel her of this notion. The Bishop naively agreed to meet with her in private on at least two occasions. These rendezvouses became the foundation of much damaging rumour and speculation.
When Claes first made herself known to the Bishop, she was in her mid-thirties, though she appeared at least a decade older. It is my understanding that she had led a hard life. Her intractable virginity had preserved within her the ardour of an adolescent girl in the grip of first love; a bearing that, in a woman of her age, seeded an insistent desperation behind her eyes, that acquired the disquieting air of burgeoning insanity when you were exposed to it for too long. It was felt by many that she might be capable of inflicting physical harm, either upon herself or upon others.
At some point, matters changed dramatically in terms of her intimacy with men. She turned up at the Cathedral six months pregnant, refusing to identify the father, and referring to her unborn child as having been gifted to her by God. As you can imagine, the rumour mill went into overdrive. For a while the Bishop's position seemed very precarious indeed. Following what I understand was some heavy-handed, behind the scenes, brow-beating from church officials, Claes submitted to a paternity test that at least absolved Olinger of any wrongdoing, though his reputation remained sullied. In the made-up minds of the multitude, even if the child wasn't his, that did not mean that he had not had relations with the woman. After all, had he not invited her to meet with him in his private chambers?
Following this incident, Marta Claes continued to be an intermittent nuisance, surfacing every so often to make a spectacle of herself. Though the novelty of her claims soon wore off on all but a small segment of the general public, in the inquisitorial eye of those church councils who make judgements upon who rises and who falls within the organisation, the Bishop's robes had been indelibly stained by the accusations that had been made against him. In a state of affairs that I think most of these individuals, if put to it, would agree was perverse, his reputation was somehow more tarnished than those in the Church who have been found guilty of far more heinous offences.
While in recent years Marta Claes has all but faded into the ether, her son, Nathaniel, who is now a grown man, has become an even greater liability. It has been difficult to pin down whether he is a loose cannon acting under his own direction, or a youthful cipher for the maniacal tendencies of his mother. He announced his existence to the Church, and to the wider world, with some insinuating posts on social media. When these opening shots across the bows of the Cathedral were ignored, he came at the Bishop with both barrels blazing. He claimed that his mother had been raped by a senior figure within the Church, and that he was the product of this forced union. One might think that Olinger, having conclusively proven that he was not the boy's father, might have been spared the full force of the scandal that was to follow. Alas, people have short memories, often wilfully in my opinion. When the facts of the paternity test were restated the narrative shifted to the credibility of the test, while others opined that even if the Bishop were not the culprit, he likely knew the identity of the guilty party and was deliberately withholding it. The Diocese, for once, came out fighting, issuing a rigorous denial of the accusations and hinting at possible action in the courts. Marta Claes, realising that a line had been crossed, apologised publicly for her son's remarks claiming he had misinterpreted something that she had told him in confidence, though by then the damage had been done. The court of public opinion, which is less forgiving than formal court, and more severe than any heavenly judgement, had reached its final verdict.
Given this recurrent scandal, it came as no surprise to me to learn that, despite the early rumours to the contrary, and despite the wide-eyed conviction of Leunis, Tunn Olinger was never seriously considered as candidate for Pope. He had done nothing wrong, however he had demonstrated poor judgement, unbefitting of one in his position. A year or so after Benedict's successor was elected, he stepped down as Bishop. I suspect that his resignation was tendered months earlier but was delayed. Such departures must be carefully managed.
His departure was not a complete severance from the Church, nor from his responsibilities towards it. Rather it was a secessus labores – a retirement to labours. There are within the body of Catholicism a great many Herculean tasks that remain undone. One might be called upon to catalogue one of the vaults of relics harvested from bygone ages, or to translate one of the libraries of volumes that, when understood, might perhaps cast a faint chink of light into a corner of our faith that was previously shrouded in total darkness. If the Church were to throw open its doors and allow all comers access to these uncurated annexes and their accumulations of clutter, I daresay that the backlog, centuries in the making, could be cleared within a matter of months. Sadly, tradition coupled with the potential for embarrassment and a potential loss of control over the boundaries of Catholic dogma, dictates that such labours may only fall under the auspices of venerable holy figures within the Church. Consequently they remain either largely unattended, or in a state of eccentric semi-completion.
Olinger, who is apparently a keen cruciverbalist and always game for a mental challenge, relocated to a farm close to the village of Eppeldorf. Here he set to work attempting to identify the bones of the three Biblical magi, from a vast pile of antiquated human remains.
Towards the end of his reign, King Herod the Great was troubled by news of a popularist cult that had gained a footing among the disenfranchised in his realm. Under the guidance of his most-trusted advisors, he devised a plan that would reveal those subjects whose loyalties could be easily drawn. He instructed a beacon to be lit at the summit of a tall stone column that stood at the border of the town of Bethlehem, and ordered that the fires should be kept burning day and night. The tower was likely a copy of the one that once stood at Babel. It occupied land where animals grazed and were stabled after dark. Agents acting on behalf of the king, made it known that the light in the heavens marked the improbable location where a new king of the Jews would be born. Having laid his trap, Herod waited and watched.
His machinations were more successful than he anticipated, attracting the attention of those not only in his own Kingdom, but also from the lands that lay beyond. Of particular note were a party of magi from the East, who were guided towards Bethlehem first by reports of a light in the sky and then, as they drew closer, by the spectacle of the light itself.
The Gospel of Matthew provides only minimal detail of their visit. Their exact number is not mentioned though it is thought to correspond to the number of gifts that were said to have been laid at the feet of the Messiah – the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh. The story of the wise men has been bolstered down through the centuries by passing mention of their pilgrimage in supplementary historical texts, each one adding a new tantalising detail.
In the version of the story that has rooted itself within the radical fringes of Catholic dogma since the 1500s, the wise men are identified as Bazen, who came from the Kingdom of Kush, which is now known as Ethiopia; Sandhimati who travelled from Hodu (India) having first renounced his throne; and Syknlt who journeyed from Persia, and whose personal emblem was a swan with its head turned back upon itself. In some accounts, he had lost his throne and had accepted exile as alternative to death.
The men presented themselves to the court of Herod where they explained to him their intent to visit the child whose arrival heralded a new Heavenly order. Herod entertained the trio for an evening. That night, as they slept, their throats were cut, and those in their retinue were murdered. Their bodies were dumped outside the royal palace where they were recovered and venerated as holy objects with many miracles being attributed to their presence. A vial of powdered blood is said to have transformed water into wine at a wedding. A withered hand raked across the Sea of Galilee enticed a bounty of fish from the waves – enough to feed the 5000 who had gathered on the shore. A finger bone, forced as a stopper into the throat of a dead man named Lazarus, returned his body to life. In some versions of this story, Lazarus is fated to die every time the bone passes through him. A cherub who had been sent to accompany him, first cleanses the knuckle before reinserting it.
Herod soon came to realise that in acting upon his fears he had allowed them to come to pass. His successor, Archelaus, had the tower outside Bethlehem demolished and the rubble carted away and used to fashion terraces in the fields, though by then it was too late.
Approximately three decades after the murders of the Three Kings, the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, had what remained of their skeletons nailed to a trio of crosses. These were erected on a hillside named Calvary, just outside the walls of Jerusalem. The display caused some local strife and the crucifixes were hastily removed with the bones still attached, and were given a proper burial. A great stone was rolled across the entrance to the tomb. The following morning, the stone was found to have been moved to one side. The remains of those who had been interred were absent. Only the three crosses remained.
In the years that were to follow, the bones of Bazen, Sandhimati and Syknlt periodically resurfaced across the Middle East. Wherever they appeared, miracles were said to trail in their wake and revolution blossomed, to the extent that they became a source of dread among the ruling classes. During the eighth century, the Caliph of Umayyad, Al-Walid II, who had grown weary of the dissent and rebellion that had been stirred-up by an expression of the bones at the market at Tiberias, where men had danced with fragments sewn to their clothing, acquired them by force and had them deposited in the palace ossuary – a deep well that contained the disembodied skeletons of the enemies of the royal dynasty. This massive quantity of human remains passed into the hands of the Catholic Church during the Ottoman rule of the late 1600s, in what was apparently an exchange of holy relics. The argument that the presence of the three martyred kings within the bone heap conferred an aspect of saintliness upon its entirety, thereby negating the need to sort them from the pile, never really gained traction. We may be thankful that those who were convinced that the story of Bazen, Sandhimati and Syknlt in itself amounted to a grand heresy, never gained the measure of support that it would have taken to have the muddled relic destroyed.
Tunn Olinger had the lot transported from a Vatican repository in Switzerland to a large metal barn on his property, where he commenced his unenviable task. His methodology was both thorough and surprisingly modern, using DNA samples to determine the geographical origins of each bone fragment, reuniting pieces of skeleton, and invoking the assistance of those who claimed a common lineage with the Three Kings, though many of these individuals were of other faiths and refused to cooperate.
He was almost a year into his work, and by all accounts making steady progress, when the barn was broken into and its contents stolen. Nathaniel Claes was arrested. He initially denied any wrongdoing. However, when compelling evidence came to light, he confessed to having stolen the bone heap with the aid of accomplices who he refused to identify. His mother, he said, had been unaware of his plans and had known nothing of his involvement prior to his arrest. He had deposited the bone fragments along a stretch of the river Sûre, in the immediate aftermath of the burglary. He eventually went to prison for his actions, though not for a long period of time.
A few weeks after Nathaniel Claes had given his confession there were reports of a man seen walking on the surface of the river Sûre. Olinger's successor as Bishop of Echternach – a distracted man of secular bearing, named Vandorme, asked me to look into it for him.
I drove out there alone. It was pleasant to be away from abbey; perhaps a sign that I should take a more permanent leave of absence. It was the dead of winter. The river was wearing a mosaic of fractured ice. I stopped to converse with an angler, clad in wading overalls, up past his midriff in the frozen water. The only obvious miracle was that he was neither shivering nor turning blue from the cold.
He told me he was a tourist from Maastricht and unfamiliar with the area. I was the first person he had seen all day.
I wandered on a short distance, though there seemed to be little profit in doing so. At the point in mid-afternoon, when the blanched hibernal sky began to grow dark, I turned and made my way back.
The angler was absent from his spot. In his place, a nocturnal heron studied a reflection of the blossoming night sky in the fragmented surface of the water. The long beak probing in silhouette the white boreholes of the stars. A pinpoint of light suddenly dashed from the mirror image by a concentric turbulence, as though it had been abruptly plucked from the firmament.