Intervention by Robin Cook Page B

Saturninus’s letter, and they can keep them or send them back to Egypt. It will be their call.”
    “My sense is that the Catholic Church is not going to like anything about this affair.”
    “They’ll have to adjust,” Shawn agreed with a snide smile.
    “Adjusting is not easy for an institution like the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church believes the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven like her son, bones and all, since hers was a virgin birth without original sin.” Sana had been raised a Catholic until her father’s death when she was eight. From then on she’d been raised an Anglican, her mother’s religion.
    “Well, as the expression goes, the ball will be in their court to deal with that issue,”
    Shawn added, with his smile lingering on his lips.
    “I wouldn’t make light of it,” Sana said.
    “I won’t,” Shawn said categorically but then added with gathering emotion, “I’m going to enjoy it. You’re right about Mary’s bones not being here on earth, but that dogma is relatively new for the Catholic Church. For centuries the Catholic Church just avoided the issue, letting people believe what they wanted to believe. It wasn’t until 1950 that Pope Pius the Twelfth made the determination ex cathedra and invoking papal infallibility, which for me, as you know, is pure nonsense. I’ve had this argument with James a thousand times: The Catholic Church wants it both ways. They evoke a divine basis for papal infallibility regarding Church matters and their interpretation of morality based on a direct apostolic lineage to Saint Peter and ultimately to Christ. Then, in the same breath, they dismiss some of the Church’s medieval popes as being only human.”
    “Calm down!” Sana ordered. Shawn’s voice had been steadily rising as he spoke. “You and I are having a discussion here, not a debate.”
    “Sorry. I’ve been wound up from the moment Rahul placed the codex in my hot little hands.”
    “Apology accepted,” Sana said. “Let me ask you another question about Saturninus’s letter. He used the word sealed when referring to Mary’s ossuary. What do you think they meant by ‘sealed’?”
    “Offhand, I’d guess wax. Burial practices at that time involved putting a corpse in a cave tomb for a year or so, then collecting the bones and putting them in a limestone box, which they called an ossuary. If the decay wasn’t complete, the box could have stunk to high heaven unless sealed. To do that, they would have had to use something like wax.”
    “Saturninus said that Mary’s body was put in a cave in Qumran. How dry is it there?”
    “Very.”
    “And how dry is it in the necropolis beneath Saint Peter’s?”
    “It varies, but there are times when it’s relatively humid. What are you thinking?”
    “I’m wondering what kind of condition the bones might be in if the ossuary stayed sealed. If dampness has been excluded, I might be able to harvest a bit of DNA.”
    Shawn chuckled with delight. “I’d never even considered that. Getting some DNA could add another dimension to this story. Maybe the Vatican could make some money by creating Bible Land, something akin to Jurassic Park, by bringing back some of the original characters, starting with Mary.”
    “I’m being serious,” Sana said, mildly offended, thinking Shawn was making fun of her.
    “I’m not talking about nuclear DNA, I’m only talking of my area of expertise: mitochondrial DNA.”
    Shawn held up his hands, again pretending to surrender. “Now, I know you’ve told me in the past, but I don’t totally remember the difference between the two types of DNA.”
    “Nuclear DNA is in the cell’s nucleus, and it contains all the information to make a cell, to allow it to differentiate into, say, a heart cell, and to cause it to function. Every cell has a full complement of nuclear DNA except red blood cells, which have no nucleus.
    But every cell has only one set. Mitochondria are microscopic energy