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MAN OF THE CLOTH
Chapter 7 GENESIS
By Brent Dorian Carpenter

      Cardinal Calabrese reentered Vatican City from the east through the cobblestoned Via della Conciliazione, which led into the Piazza San Pietro--Saint Peter’s
Plaza--containing an ancient Egyptian obelisk predating Christ’s birth, and two fountains at its center. The ovoid was originally the demented Emperor Caligula’s
macabre circus, which he built in the Vaticanus in 40 A.D., to feature chariot races and other manly contests so enamored of a certain kind of Roman. When Peter
addressed the Jewish authorities twenty centuries past, he spake the words, “We must obey God, rather than men.” Such sentiment annoyed the emperors who
fancied themselves gods. It was for this reason and in this circus the first saint was martyred.
      Calabrese bypassed the Apostolic Palace and Borgia Apartments, crossing the short distance to the Sistene Chapel, just to the north of Saint Peter’s Basilica.
Dusk was falling as surely as were the autumn leaves and most of the tourists were departing for the day. The cardinal had already arranged special passage for his
guest with the Swiss Guard, the formerly fearsome mercenaries pledged to serve acriter et fideliter, courageously and faithfully, in the protection of the pope and the
institutions of Vatican City.
      The Sistene Chapel is the private, official papal chapel where conclaves for the election of popes are held. It was completed in 1481 under the supervision of
master architect Giovanni de Dolci for Pope Sixtus IV, who commissioned the first of fourteen awe-inspiring frescoes by several generations of artists illustrating the
lives of Moses and Christ along its walls. Lunettes over the windows depict Christ’s ancestors; figures of prophets and sibyls sit in illusionistic architectural niches
surrounding the scenes. Works by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and other Renaissance artists are crowned by Michaelangelo’s magnificent ceiling frescoes depicting scenes
from Genesis and his enormous Last Judgment behind the altar.
      It was here the cardinal met in person the man he had spoken to on the telephone only for the very first time earlier this week; the eminent Nobel Prize-winning
Swiss Dr. Wilmut Gunther Jung, director of Jung Industrial Group of Zurich. Jung rose from the front pew, a tall, reed-thin man in his late-sixties, jet black-dyed
hair, thick spectacles adorning his angular, ferret-like face. The multi-billionaire was impeccably dressed in a flawless $30,000 signature white Vivienne Westwood
ensemble which had seemingly been weaved around him. A humorless contingent of bodyguards stood vigil nearby. Here was a man, Calabrese mused, who
commanded absolute control and conveyed consummate power.
      Jung was by now a world-renowned geneticist and globally-recognized celebrity in his own right. To say the eccentric scientist had created something of an
international stir three years earlier would certainly rank as one of the first major understatements of the new century. For it was at that time he stunned the entire
world by engineering in his subsidiary laboratory GenTron several living specimens of formerly extinct animals, the woolly mammoth, quagga and dodo bird among
them. His fortunes were considerably enhanced when bidding wars for the cloned animals erupted from zoos around the globe.
Jung craftily arranged to place one beast each on each continent. “Give the masses spectacle,” he crowed at the time in the now-famous interview. “Let them travel
far. They’re going to see creatures which have been extinct for ten thousand years. Make them work for it!” The rest, as is so often said, is history.
“Buon giorno, Father Attanasio,” Jung greeted the cardinal with a vigorous handshake. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
      “Buon giorno, Dr. Jung, and I assure you the pleasure and the honor is all mine,” Calabrese replied, every word of it ringing true. He joined the doctor on the
pew, the two men conversing in their mutual language English. “Please, sit. Suffice to say, I have followed your work with great interest.”
      “Yes, it has been electrifying, hasn’t it,” Jung said, not immodestly. “And to think it was all inspired by that little dinosaur movie about twenty years back.”
      “‘Jurassic Park’?”
      “The very one. I was intrigued by the concept of returning to life creatures that were presumed to be gone forever. GenTron Laboratories has, unfortunately,
been unable to locate any viable dinosaur DNA samples as easily as the scientist in the film, but don’t think we haven’t tried!” Jung guffawed, a nasal snigger which
echoed in the cavernous chapel, and left the cardinal unsure whether he was entirely serious or not.
      “We are working, however,” Jung continued, “on two new projects right this very moment that are particular close to my heart. One is the reintroduction of the
passenger pigeon, a bird which became extinct only in 1901. The average person, however, wouldn’t know a passenger pigeon, excuse my language, father, if he were
pissing on one. Fortunately, GenTron’s second project is far more exciting and should captivate the world to the same extent as the sight of those living Mastodons
we produced.
      “Our fossil teams have been to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles digging around in the muck. Fascinating, some of the bizarre lifeforms that have been partially
preserved down there. After considerable effort, we were able to retrieve an excellent DNA sample of a Smilodon californicus, my boyhood favorite. Oh, I’m so
excited!”
      “Smilowhat?” Calabrese asked, completely at a loss.
      “I’m shocked, father. Shocked!” Jung playfully scolded. “As a man of ancient languages, you should be familiar with the Latin term for the sabre-toothed tiger!”
      “Oh,” Calabrese gasped breathlessly. He was suitably flabbergasted. Jung had grown to take exquisite pleasure in eliciting such reactions.
      “The sabre-tooth cultures are growing rather nicely at the lab. I expect to be able to make an announcement by the end of the month. Those poor pandas Ling-
Ling and Ping-Ping have practically died of neglect already. This will surely finish them off!”
      “Which is why I chose you for my project, doctor. The Americans, the Germans, the Japanese... they have each done remarkable things in the field of human
cloning. But you, sir, some of the things I’ve heard, the whispered rumors, those put you light-years ahead of them all.”
      “Why, Cardinal Calabrese, whatever could you mean?” Jung teased facetiously, toying with the priest.
      “Your contemporaries have the ability to clone people in fetal form, but those fetuses must then be implanted in the wombs of surrogate mothers and gestated
through a normal birth. This has been a panacea for grieving parents who wished to recreate dead children, and for those who desire much younger versions of
themselves for future exploitation as living organ donor banks.”
      “True,” Jung said. “This is no different than what we do at GenTron.”
      “The difference, doctor, is that you are said to have secretly pioneered a new cloning technique, one in which exact duplicates are produced as from a copying
machine, bypassing the necessity for a fetal developmental stage.”
      “And what if something like that were possible, cardinal? Can you imagine it? A beloved figure tragically dies, such as your pope, for example, and the next day
he is alive again, ready to resume his function as leader. What might something like that be worth, father? The trouble with the scenario, however, lies in finding a
solution for the problem that you might be able to duplicate the person, but not his thoughts. Memories are chemically encoded in the human brain and thus would
not genetically transfer to the proposed clone. Said copy would be a blank slate and would have to be painstakingly taught everything about the original donor, a
process which, theoretically at best, might be somewhat accelerated by various teaching techniques.”
      “Is it possible, Dr. Jung?” Calabrese whispered, barely able to contain himself. “Can you return a deceased person to life, as you did with those extinct animals,
at exactly the stage at which he departed life?”
      “My dear cardinal, surely you must know that in the fearful, hysterical atmosphere following the creation of the first human clones, international laws were
passed prohibiting the replication of deceased persons without their prior legal consent.”
      “The law aside, doctor, is it possible?”
      “Anything is possible, Cardinal Calabrese, when Man puts his mind to it. As for the legality of it all, well ... there are always ways around laws, now aren’t
there?”
      “And what are your feelings about the moral implications of such a project, doctor?”
      “As a scientist, my task is to invent, to create. It falls to men like you, father, the clergy, the historians, to ultimately judge the value of the results of my work.
That is a very profound lesson I was taught by my father a long, long time ago.
      “If I may speak candidly, sir, I do not understand the Vatican opposition to the
process of cloning. Do you realize that cloning is natural, that it exists in Nature?”
      “It does?” came Calabrese’s surprised response. “How do you figure?”
      “Take the starfish, for example,” Jung explained. “If you sever its five arms by cutting, each one will grow back into a complete starfish. You have created five
clones. Or how about bacterium, or viruses, or any number of animals which reproduce themselves asexually? Is this not similar to Jesus’ conception? God’s DNA
supernaturally implanted in Mary’s womb? This is the essence of cloning. Twins, triplets, quadruplets, typically they all come from a single fertilized egg. The
zygote splits, and voila! Clones!”
      “You’re kidding, right?” Calabrese couldn't believe his ears. This was wonderful news.
      “Your Church and Science have been at loggerheads since the dawn of time, cardinal, and it need not be so. I am reminded of the famous case of the astronomer
Galileo who, under house arrest and threat of ex-communication by the Church, was forced to recant his findings that the Earth revolves around the sun because such
a notion conflicted with Vatican sensibilities of an Earth-centered universe.”
      “I know the story well, good doctor, and I’m sure you’ll recall that following his forced recantation, Galileo was heard to mutter under his breath, ‘but it still
rotates!’ I make this point to underscore that not all of us in the Holy See are as brutish as some of our less enlightened predecessors.”
      “I am delighted to hear it, Father Calabrese. For just as you chose me for my accomplishments, I have likewise chosen you for the scope of the challenge you
have presented to me. I have of late spent a considerable amount of time pondering how I was going to top my Nobel Prize for chemistry. Surely this opportunity
will grant me my greatest glory.”
      “Glory for Jesus, Dr. Jung. Glory for our Lord.”
      “Very well, cardinal, let’s do it! Grant me access to the blood samples on the Shroud of Turin, and I will give you Jesus Christ!”
      On the vaulted ceiling above the two men’s heads, the hand of God reached down from the Heavens and instilled glorious life into the hand of Man at the advent
of Genesis.

“Thou shalt have none other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing
that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the
           waters beneath the earth.”
              Deuteronomy:5:7-8