The Jesus Drug: The Miracle Pill

By Adam Jefferson

It’s what they’ve always prayed for: the cure for evil. So why is the Catholic Church hellbent on destroying the Jesus Drug?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244224523

Adam Jefferson

Adam Jefferson researches the most disturbing aspects of the human psyche.

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The Jesus Drug: The Miracle Pill

The Jesus Drug: The Miracle Pill

Adam Jefferson

Copyright © Adam Jefferson 2019

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

The Sacred College of Cardinals

Sistine Chapel, The Vatican, 1948

It’s what they’ve always prayed for: the cure for evil. So why is the Catholic Church hellbent on destroying the Jesus Drug?

He couldn’t stop himself. He kept thinking of what the Roman people had done to Pope John when they discovered he was really Pope Joan. The cardinals had led the mob in tearing the impostor limb from limb. Now Cardinal Kowalski thought they might do the same to him. Eden, after all, was his project. Designed to create heaven on earth, it had delivered hell instead. Had he somehow listened to Satan rather than God? Was the Antichrist’s greatest triumph to pose as Christ and be accepted as the Messiah? The drug that cured evil was not at all what it seemed. The miracle pill that stopped the Apocalypse was itself the Apocalypse.

Kowalski stared at the lower section of the fresco behind the altar, showing the damned being dragged into hell. The Last Judgment, Michelangelo’s masterpiece, had always been his favorite painting. On his frequent trips to the Sistine Chapel, he had sat for hours staring at the frightening images. Now he felt that his own Day of Judgment had come.

As the commotion around him grew, Kowalski heard the booming voice of Cardinal Monsenti. He imagined that it would be this same voice that would one day announce the end of the world.

God will never forgive us for this, Monsenti bellowed. He was a huge man of six feet four and 240 pounds. He had once trained as a tenor. He had even sung for the Pope on his birthday. This time there was no music in his voice. We will never survive this scandal, he said. This will destroy us all. The Church, may God forgive me, is finished.

Kowalski closed his eyes. Maybe Monsenti was right. Maybe the Church was over. He no longer knew what to think. He was as dismayed as the rest of them, probably much more so. He needed something that would wash the pain away, something that would remind him, in the simplest possible way, that life could still be enjoyed. He thought of whisky, a fine Scottish single malt like the Glenfiddich he treated himself to every Christmas. But there was no whisky in the Sistine Chapel. Instead, he had to face the reality that he was the cause of the sacred college of cardinals of the Holy Roman Church having to be assembled in emergency session for the first time ever.

It was appropriate that they were meeting in the Sistine Chapel, beneath Michelangelo’s great painted ceiling, with the face of God above them, watching their every move, scrutinizing every one of their thoughts. What they did now would decide the future of everything – of the Church, and even humanity itself.

The cardinals were wearing their scarlet vestments and their traditional broad-brimmed, tasseled hats, now worn only on special occasions. As Kowalski knew well, no occasion could be more special than this one.

Almost all of them were on their feet, demanding their chance to speak. Those still sitting seemed dazed, unable to process what was happening, unable to digest the information they had been given. A few were openly in tears.

Pius XII, the pontiff who had personally placed the Cardinal’s hat on Kowalski’s head seven years before, was sitting white-faced and rigid on his papal throne – the grand, imposing Cathedra – positioned directly in front of the Sistine Chapel’s grand altar. His hands were visibly trembling. If people can really age in minutes, then it had happened right here to Pius. His face was drained, his eyes expressing infinite weariness. Two aides flanked him, clearly concerned for his state of health. It didn’t help that he had recently been diagnosed as suffering from angina.

Kowalski’s own heart was feeling the strain. His blood pressure had become so dangerously high that doctors had immediately put him on strong medication. His health reflected his opinion of himself – declining dramatically. How had it come to this?

In his four decades as a cleric in the Catholic Church, he had believed himself one of the good men, indeed the best men, making a real difference, righting the ancient wrongs. He had regarded himself as honest, truthful, practical, a fighter for justice and all high and noble things. Now he wondered. He wondered above all if the Devil had whispered and he had strained to hear. Did he choose to listen to the siren voices of the wicked, the Fallen? Did he become their unwitting agent, their useful idiot? He wondered if Eden, his initiative that he believed would transform humanity, had in fact destroyed his beloved Church.

When he had entered Auschwitz three years earlier, shortly after the Russian forces liberated it, he had never imagined what he would find there. The survivors of the death camp had looked like the damned from Michelangelo’s paintings. Some of them, wild with hysteria, had mentioned strange pills. He wished he had never listened to them. He wished he had never gone into medical compound Z-1. Above all, he wished he had turned his back on the stockpile of yellow pills that the Nazis had referred to only as Drug 4. However, when his aides told him what captured Nazi scientists had said about Drug 4, he could scarcely believe it. If any of it was true then mankind might be given a second chance from the unlikeliest source, almost as if God had been determined to bring the brightest good from the darkest evil. That seemed appropriately redemptive. Don’t they say that the darkest hour is just before the dawn?

Amazingly – it must have been an oversight or accident – the Russians had allowed his team to remove Drug 4 and all the scientific documents associated with it. Actually, they seemed to be under high-level diplomatic instructions to ensure good relations between the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church. Probably, they had not had time to properly assess just how significant Drug 4 was, or they had no desire to touch anything the Nazis had been harvesting in death camps. If so, they were far more insightful than Kowalski. They knew you must never dance with the Devil, no matter how attractive his tune. No one makes better music than Satan.

A few days later, the Russians rounded up most of the Nazis who had worked on Drug 4. They didn’t bother with a trial. They summarily hanged all of them. Only one man escaped the mass execution – the Mephistophelean SS doctor who had been in charge of the compound and the drug’s development and had fled a week before the Soviets arrived.

There were no photographs of the mastermind of Drug 4. No one knew his real name. He had wiped out all evidence pertaining to his true identity. Prisoners and colleagues alike called him by a very strange nickname – Tod … the German word for death.

Kowalski felt as if he himself had become Death. Many of his fellow cardinals were still staring numbly at the screen where the film had been shown of the catastrophe in the Amazonian rainforest near the shanty town of Aruzari.

Kowalski’s mind drifted back three years to the special meeting to approve project Eden. It had all been so different back then. He could remember the Pope’s inspirational speech, just weeks after the end of the war. From the infinite horror of the death camps has come infinite hope, Pius said. In the hour of our despair, God has come to us and granted us a glimpse of heaven. From the hands of murderers has come a wondrous gift. From an earthly hell, a new Eden may be born. The tragic dead can give birth to brilliant new life. What better sign of his divine compassion could there be than for God to allow the worst desolation to be transformed into perfect love, to allow killers to be the unwitting agents of peace? We must grasp this chance. We would never be forgiven if we did not.

They had all wanted to believe that, or almost all of them. Cardinal Umbersini, the eminence grise who had guided Cardinal Monsenti’s rise to prominence, led a small group of dissenters. Make no mistake, Umbersini had warned, "this is the danse macabre." They had chosen to dance anyway. Now payment was demanded. If something seems too good to be true…

Throughout the long debate to approve the project, Umbersini had steadfastly opposed the motion. With his anemic face and skeletal fingers, he had seemed like a nosferatu. Over and over again he had repeated a chilling mantra with that thin, asthmatic voice of his: Out of the depths come the worst monsters. He had a bald head, a squint in one eye, and severe facial eczema. It was an appearance that made it difficult for people to look at him for long. No one warmed to him, or his Cassandra speeches. You think this is a gift from God, he said until they were sick of the sound of him. You are wrong. Then the ice-cold finale. This is Satan’s pill. This is the broad, smooth road to hell.

In the end, Umbersini alone had refused to add his signature to the charter to establish Eden. For that, he was ostracized from the corridors of power. He was given a research post in the Apostolic Library within the Vatican, where his superiors could keep an eye on him. It was a job with no influence, no status – a career dead end. For a man of Umbersini’s ambition, there could have been no