# The Absolute at Large/Chapter 19

Chapter XIX
The Process of Canonization
You will readily understand that the admission of the Absolute to the bosom of the Church afforded, under the given circumstances, a great surprise. It was carried out by virtue of the Papal Brief alone, and the College of Cardinals, being faced with the accomplished fact, merely deliberated whether the sacrament of baptism should be conferred upon the Absolute. It was decided to dispense with this. There was certainly well-known ecclesiastical precedent for the baptism of a God (vide John the Baptist); but even in such a case the candidate for baptism must be present in person. Besides, it was a very delicate political question to decide which reigning potentate was to be godfather to the Absolute. The Sacred Congregation therefore recommended that at the next Pontifical Mass the Holy Father should pray for the new member of the Church, and this was duly carried out in very solemn form. It was also made part of the body of Church doctrine that in addition to the sacrament of baptism and baptism by blood the Church also ​recognized baptism through works of meritoriousness, and virtue.
It must also be recorded that three days before the publication of the Papal Brief the Pope gave a lengthy audience to G. H. Bondy, who was afterwards in conference with the Papal Secretary, Monsignor Cullatti, for twenty-four hours.
Almost simultaneously the summary beatification of the Absolute was enacted under the rule super cultu immemorabili in recognition of the virtuous life of the Absolute, now declared Blessed, and a regular but expedited process of canonization was arranged for. There was, however, one highly important innovation: the Absolute was to be declared, not a Saint, but a God. A Deification Commission was immediately appointed from among the best of the Church's scholars and pastors. Varesi, the Cardinal Archbishop of Venice, was appointed Procurator Dei, while Monsignor Cullatti was to act as Advocatus Diaboli.
Cardinal Varesi presented seventeen thousand testimonies to miracles performed, signed by nearly all the cardinals, patriarchs, primates, metropolitans, princes of the Church, archbishops, principals of Orders, and abbots. To each testimonial were appended expert reports by medical authorities and members of faculties, opinions from professors of natural sciences, technicians, and economists, as well ​as the signatures of eye-witnesses and legal authentications. These seventeen thousand documents, Monsignor Varesi stated, represented but an insignificant fraction of the miracles actually performed by the Absolute, their number having already at a conservative estimate exceeded thirty millions.
In addition to this the Procurator Dei secured detailed expert opinions from the greatest scientific specialists in the world. Professor Gardien, Rector of the medical faculty in Paris, for example, after exhaustive researches, wrote as follows: "Seeing that innumerable cases presented to us for examination were from a medical standpoint completely hopeless and scientifically incurable (paralysis, cancer of the throat, blindness after surgical removal of both eyes, lameness following on amputation of both the lower extremities, death following on complete separation of the head from the trunk, strangulation in a subject hanged two days before, etc.), the medical faculty of the Sorbonne is of the opinion that the so-called miraculous cures in such cases can only be ascribed either to complete ignorance of anatomical and pathological conditions, clinical inexperience, and utter incompetence in medical practice, or—a possibility we do not wish to exclude—to the interference of higher powers not limited by the laws of nature or any knowledge thereof."
Professor Meadow of Glasgow, the psychologist, ​wrote: ". . . . Since in these activities there is manifest what is obviously a thinking being, capable of association, memory, and even of logical judgment, a being which performs these psychic operations without the medium of a brain and nervous system, it affords a striking corroboration of my crushing criticism of the psychophysical parallelism advocated by Professor Meyer. I affirm that the so-called Absolute is a psychic, conscious, and intelligent being, albeit our scientific knowledge of its nature is as yet but small."
Professor Lupen of the Brno Technical Institute wrote: "From the standpoint of effective performance, the Absolute is a force deserving of the highest respect."
The famous chemist, Willibald of Tubingen, wrote: "The Absolute possesses all the requisite conditions of existence and scientific evolution, as it is in admirable conformity with Einstein's theory of Relativity."
The present chronicler will no longer detain you with the pronouncements of the world's scientific luminaries; in any case they were all published in the Acts of the Holy See.
The process of canonization went forward in quick time. In the meantime a committee of eminent authorities on dogma and exegesis had completed a statement in which the identity of the Absolute with ​the Third Person of the Trinity was definitely established on the basis of the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers of the Church.
But before the ceremony of deification took place, the Patriarch of Constantinople declared, as head of the Eastern Church, the identity of the Absolute with the First Person of the Trinity, the Creator. This undeniably heretical teaching was espoused by the Old Catholics, the circumcised Christians of Abyssinia, the Evangelicals of the Helvetian Confession, the Nonconformists, and several of the larger American sects. This brought about a lively theological dispute. As for the Jews, a secret doctrine spread among them to the effect that the Absolute was Baal of old; the Liberal Jews announced that they would in that case recognize Baal.
The Free Thought Society assembled in Basle. In the presence of two thousand delegates the Absolute was proclaimed as the God of the Freethinkers, and this was followed by an incredibly violent attack upon clerics of all denominations, who, in the terms of the resolution, "are eager to seek their own advantage with the one scientific God and to drag Him down into the filthy cage of ecclesiastical dogma and priestly deception, and leave Him there to starve." But the God who has made Himself manifest to the eyes of every progressive modern thinker "has nothing to do with the mediæval traffic of these ​Pharisees; the Free Thought Association alone is His congregation, and only the Basle Congress has the right to set forth the doctrine and the ritual of the Free Religion."
At about the same time the German Monist Association laid in Leipzig, with great pomp and ceremony, the foundation-stone of the future Cathedral of the Atomic God. There was some disturbance, in which sixteen persons were injured and Lüttgen, the famous physicist, had his spectacles smashed.
News was also received that autumn of some religious phenomena in the Belgian Congo and in French Senegambia. The negroes quite unexpectedly slaughtered and ate the missionaries and bowed down to a new idol which they called Ato or Alolto. It afterwards appeared that these idols were atomic motors, and that German officers and agents were in some way implicated in the matter. On the other hand, during the Moslem rising which broke out at Mecca in December of the same year, several French emissaries were found to have been present, who had concealed twelve light atomic motors of the Aero pattern in the neighbourhood of the Kaaba. The ensuing rebellion of the Mohammedans in Egypt and Tripoli, and the massacres in Arabia, cost the lives of about thirty thousand Europeans.
The deification of the Absolute was at length ​accomplished in Rome on the twelfth of December.
Seven thousand priests with lighted candles escorted the Holy Father to St. Peter's, where the largest twelve-ton Karburator, a gift from the M.E.C. to the Holy See, had been erected behind the high altar. The ceremony lasted five hours, and twelve hundred of the faithful and the spectators were crushed to death. At the stroke of noon, the Pope intoned the "In nomine Dei Deus," and at the same moment the bells of all the Catholic churches in the world were set ringing as all the bishops and priests turned from the altars and announced to the world of believers: "Habemus Deum."