Rev. Professor Patrick Pullicino’s discovery about the death of Christ and his contribution to Malta’s health services recounted by Dr. Hermann Farrugia.

Yesterday, this site published an article that appeared in The Telegraph about the Maltese Priest and Professor of medicine Patrick Pullicino regarding the death of Christ. Hermann Farrugia writes about the discovery made by this ex-colleague. Farrugia described Pullicino as an exemplary character and a formidable academic. They worked academically together back in the eighties.  Hermann Farrugia comments as follows on Patrick Pullicino and his discovery:

“It is indeed noteworthy today pointing out the professional activity and affiliation of the author of this recent scientific paper, reviewing fresh evidence in the form of further detailed traumatological aspects that had immediately contributed to Jesus Christ’s Passion and Death.

Rev Prof Patrick Pullicino obtained his Doctorate in Medicine and Surgery at The Royal University of Malta in 1973 and after the traineeship undertook higher specialisation studies and qualified in the field of neurology. I distinctly reminisce my time as a House Physician at St Luke’s Hospital Gwardamangia during the mid/late eighties wherein concurrently Prof Pullicino practised as a full-time Senior Physician in Malta’s National Healthcare System.

During this interval and for a substantial while having been attached to the Late Dr. Victor Captur’s Firm, Prof. Pullicino had also actively contributed to the evolving medical education programme at the then progressively revamped Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Malta.

These are my immediate remarks in respect of Rev Prof Pullicino’s breakthrough assessment as duly carried in last Thursday’s ‘The Daily Telegraph’. It appears very possible that the cumulative effect of traumatic shear-tear forces sustained on Jesus Christ’s Right shoulder joint through the successive falls to the ground on His Way-of-The-Cross led to the progressive collapse of his shoulder capsule rendering him incapable of carrying the patibulum further. Incidentally, it must have been at some critical point on this fateful route that the necessity arose for Simon of Cyrene to get handpicked from the standing crowd and obliged to come to Christ’s support in the course of his final Approach to calvary.

This event is recounted in all of the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 27:32, Mark 15:21-22, and Luke 23:26). It is interesting to note that this particular incident, in the traditional set of Fourteen Stations of the Cross that derive from the seventeenth-century Spanish religious culture, corresponds to the Fifth Station of The Via Crucis only just following the First Fall of Jesus under His Cross.

Nonetheless, Saint John Paul II had introduced a form of scriptural stations of the Cross more closely linked to precise events recorded in the Biblical Accounts. This updated form of the Stations is known as the Scriptural Stations of the Cross. Here Simon of Cyrene features later during the course of the Via Dolorosa and specifically at Station Eight after Christ was made to bear and endure the weight of His Cross. Today, a third and even ‘newer’ sequence of the Stations of the Cross was recently introduced by the Catholic Bishops of the Philippines and this time Simon of Cyrene gets called in and effectively sets out to help Jesus at Station Seven and this so more understandably after the whole documented chronology of Christ having already critically sustained the painful brunt of His three consecutive falls.”