Science And The Shroud
By DAVID VAN BIEMA
And Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. And he bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud, and laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of the rock; and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. --Gospel of Mark, 15: 44-46
When its moment arrives again, this Saturday, the venerable--and venerated--relic will be slipped out of the silver casket that has protected it for centuries, through fire and water, doubt and blind belief. Gingerly, fastidiously, overseen by Giovanni Cardinal Saldarini and a German textile conservation expert, it will be unspooled from around its wooden cylinder. After a top cloth has been pulled away--red taffeta, sewn by Princess Clotilde of Savoy in 1868--the fragile, scarred length of ancient linen will be smoothed into place in a metal-and-glass display case built precisely to its dimensions. The case's air will be drawn out and replaced with argon, an inert gas. Then the case will be hung horizontally at the intersection of the Turin Cathedral's nave and transept, near the center of the cathedral's built-in cross. And thus six days after Easter, spectators will be allowed to view an image that has grown fainter with each unveiling: the portrait of a dead man.
A faded image of a body, splashes of blood. A scrap of cloth that may attest both Passion and Resurrection. The Roman Catholic hierarchy in this northwestern Italian city, renowned for its auto industry--and, well, for this--estimates that 3 million people will line up in the next eight weeks to view what has come to be known as the Shroud of Turin, on public display for the first time in 20 years. Seven hundred thousand have reserved their places. The Pope will arrive on May 24 to venerate the relic. Some of the pilgrims who precede and follow him will no doubt come out of idle curiosity. Some will come to view a historic conundrum. But the majority will make the pilgrimage to the Shroud of Turin in order to attain grace in the presence of clothing Jesus left behind when he arose on the third day.
But wait a moment. There's something wrong with this picture. Hasn't this all been settled--and in the negative? It certainly seemed so. In 1988, just as scientific testing and historical scholarship had convinced ever greater numbers of intelligent people that the shroud might indeed be Jesus' burial cloth, its keepers elected to allow one more test. They distributed small samples to three laboratories for radiocarbon dating. Several months later, the labs revealed their verdict: the linen of the cloth dated no earlier than the late Middle Ages. Skeptics rejoiced; romantics were subdued. One crestfallen enthusiast later wrote, "It seemed that anyone who had previously upheld any serious case for the shroud's credibility...had been dealt a fatal stab to the heart."
And yet a sort of resurrection has occurred. Counterintuitive as it may seem in an age when technology has either trumped belief or become its new focus, a fascination with the shroud seems to have not only survived but also flourished. It can be tracked on the World Wide Web, from the official archdiocese site to the home page of the Turin fire brigade (which saved the relic during a fire last April). It can be discussed at the Centre International d'Etudes sur le Linceul de Turin in Paris, the Collegamento pro Sindone in Rome (sindon is the Latin word for shroud), Valencia's Centro Espanol de Sindonologia or with the members of variously titled organizations in England and the U.S., whose members happily refer to themselves as "shroudies." It finds its adherents among everyday Catholics and among the exalted as well: during an in-flight press conference in 1989 on his way to Madagascar, when asked if he believed the shroud to be genuine, John Paul II replied, "I think it is."
What is most striking about the resurgent interest may be not its persistence but its aggressiveness. It appears to have bred that rare 20th century phenomenon, the refusal to accept what under other circumstances would be considered a foregone scientific conclusion. On Website after Website, in book after much hyped book and in the Turin Cathedral this week, an act of rebellion is under way. It is not as sweeping as the creationists' jihad against Darwin, but it is also far more focused: what is under attack here is not a vast theory with admitted gaps but a specific experiment on a specific piece of cloth--an apparently pure application of the scientific method that the West has taken for granted since the days of the Enlightenment.
To be sure, not even the most avid defender of radiocarbon dating would deny that at least one mystery continues to surround the shroud: How did the image of a man, plainly crucified and preternaturally finely rendered, get on it in the first place? Were the image not allegedly Christ's, the matter would be relegated to obscure academic journals on Byzantine textile technology. As things stand, however, the conundrum of origin and the slim chance that the scientific dating may have been rigged (not likely) or flawed (a better possibility) are being employed by die-hard shroudies to shore up their hope that their cause is not lost. Faith is ratcheting up the scrutiny on science to unheard-of levels, and the mystified scientists, who considered the case essentially closed, find themselves challenged to make it so airtight that not even a prayer can slip in.
A 14TH CENTURY SKEPTIC One of the first universally accepted documentations of what we now know as the Shroud of Turin happens to be a letter declaring it a fraud. In 1389 Pierre d'Arcis, then Bishop of Troyes, described a "twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and the front...thus impressed together with the wounds which he bore." The linen cloth had occupied a place of honor in a church in the tiny French town of Lirey since the 1350s; D'Arcis, who was writing to his Pope, complained that "although it is not publicly stated to be the true shroud of Christ, nevertheless this is given out and noised abroad in private." This annoyed D'Arcis, who wrote that a predecessor of his had ascertained that "the image is cunningly painted...a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed."
What D'Arcis's letter sketched out, documents left by 16th century nuns described in detail: the 14-ft.-long, herringbone-twill linen cloth of which the bishop spoke did bear the image of a naked and bearded man about 6 ft. tall, hair in a loose ponytail, back apparently scourged with a multithonged whip, hands crossed modestly before him. The figure was already faded then: a more recent witness described it as having "both the color and character of faint scorch marks on a well-used ironing cover." But not so faint that, D'Arcis excepted, people doubted who it was. Believers continued to converge on Lirey. Later, after the shroud fell into the possession of Italy's royal Savoy family and was moved to Turin, the church granted it its own feast day, and crowds viewing its public showings grew so thick that some pilgrims died of suffocation.
The Middle Ages, of course, were salad days for relics, real and fake (churches in Constantinople and Angeli boasted heads of John the Baptist), and as the centuries rolled on, bits of the True Cross or Our Lady's shoe faded from prominence within their gilded reliquaries. What catapulted the shroud into its role as a modern touchstone was the testimony of a thoroughly modern invention: the camera. On May 28, 1898, a city councillor named Secondo Pia took the first photographs of the relic. One scholar recounts that as the negative image began to appear in his darkroom, Pia "nearly dropped the plate." Markings that had been faint on the cloth suddenly jumped out with such extraordinary clarity and added detail that "he felt certain he was looking on the face of Jesus." And, in subsequent exposures, his body. The lance wound in the chest and the bloody rivulets where a crown of thorns might have bitten were suddenly vividly manifest. It was eerie. As sindonologist Ian Wilson puts it in his new book, The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World's Most Sacred Relic Is Real (Free Press; 333 pages; $25), "The clear implication was that the shroud itself was, in effect, a photographic negative that had been waiting dormant, like a preprogrammed time capsule, for the moment that photography's invention would release its hidden true 'positive.'"
It certainly released a new wave of fascination, both popular and scientific. In the 100 years following Pia's epiphany, the cloth has been removed from its silver casket not just for the public but also to several waves of scientific observers. The trend's high point occurred in 1978, when the Roman Catholic Church allowed a five-day extravaganza during which more than two dozen scientists from the U.S., Italy and Switzerland performed a battery of tests on the shroud and also used pieces of tape to lift material from its surface for later study. The tests included photo- and electron microscopy, X rays, spectroscopy, ultraviolet fluorescence, thermography and chemical analyses. Among the scientists' findings: that the shroud had come into direct contact with a body and that the "blood" on the cloth is probably real blood. The figure itself bears no telltale brushstrokes and seems have been rendered by no artistic method either of the Middle Ages or of Jesus' time. Publicized by a spate of books, the 1978 findings exposed more people to the shroud than had ever thought of it before--and convinced a hefty portion of them that it was indeed Christ's burial sheet. That is, until an additional experiment seemed to rule out that possibility entirely.
On April 21, 1988, under the gaze of Anastasio Cardinal Ballestrero of Turin and a video camera, Italian microanalyst Giovanni Riggi cut a 1/2-in. by 3-in. strip of linen from the shroud, well away from its central image and any charred or patched areas. He divided the strip into three postage stamp-size samples and distributed them to representatives of laboratories in Zurich, Oxford and the University of Arizona in Tucson. Each then performed at least three radiocarbon measurements on its sample.
Radiocarbon dating works by measuring an artifact for an isotope called carbon 14, traces of which are contained in all organic substances, including the flax plants from which the shroud's linen was made. Carbon 14 is unstable and decays over time into another isotope. The amount present in living organisms remains nearly constant because it is continually replaced through the intake of food and air. But when animals and plants die, their level of carbon 14 begins to decrease at a known, fixed rate. Thus the amount of residual carbon 14 in an object provides a measurement of its age.
The scientists retreated to their labs. In October of the same year, the Oxford team gave a press conference at the British Museum. To eliminate suspense, they had helpfully written two dates on a chalkboard behind them: "1260-1390!" This estimated span for the origin of the shroud's linen was later detailed in an article co-written with the other two labs for the journal Nature, which straightforwardly stated that the radiocarbon-dating results "provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval." Nuclear physicist Harry Gove, who helped develop the radiocarbon-dating process used on the shroud, went a bit further. He said the odds were "about one in a thousand trillion" against the shroud's having been woven in the time of Jesus. Edward Hall, a member of the Oxford team, went further still. Anyone who continued to believe the shroud was genuine, he pronounced, must be a "flat-earther."
BUCKING THE ODDS "If it were proved fake tomorrow, it wouldn't shake my faith," says Ian Wilson from his home near Brisbane, Australia. "The fact that it might have touched the body of Christ doesn't move me at all. It's just knowing that the image exists. I would be as interested in a 14th century cloth if I could find the artist who made it."
Well, maybe. Few people have put as much effort into proving that no human hand painted the shroud--and that it is far older than the radiocarbon dating allows--as the cheerful, Oxford-educated Wilson. Perhaps the best known and most open minded of the shroud apologists, Wilson, 57, has penned three shroud books and spent innumerable hours researching the relic. He was first captivated by a photograph of the image at age 15. "It just didn't seem like a work of art to me; it whetted my interest and rocked my agnosticism." He eventually converted to Catholicism and penned what is probably the most stirring hypothetical description ever of the shroud's possible origin. "In the darkness of the Jerusalem tomb the dead body of Jesus lay, unwashed, covered in blood, on a stone slab," he wrote in his 1978 best seller The Shroud of Turin. "Suddenly there is a burst of mysterious power from it. In that instant the blood dematerializes, dissolved perhaps by the flash, while its image and that of the body becomes indelibly fused onto the cloth, preserving for posterity a literal 'snapshot' of the Resurrection."
Despite such eloquent partisanship, which he sustains in The Blood and the Shroud, Wilson is punctiliously fair minded, always printing the other side's opinion before politely taking issue with it. He delights in sindonology's varied arcana. The new book touches on such points as Roman graffiti, the readouts of a machine called the VP-8 Image Analyzer, grisaille (monochrome gray) painting and the feeding habits of the ibis. He discusses the musculature of the brow and the existence of the twill-and-herringbone weave in ancient Palestinian linen, and in a footnote he downplays the possibility that the image on the shroud is that of a leader of the Knights Templar who was crucified before being executed. But he also keeps an eye on the basics. What does he feel he can say unequivocally about the shroud? "Based on medical evidence and other information, the image seems to be someone crucified in the manner of Christ." As opposed, he means, to the manner in which the Crucifixion has traditionally been depicted in Western art. "The nail wounds in the hands go through the wrists, not the palms," consistent with what little we now know about the gory practice in the Roman Empire of the 1st century. "And those are real blood flows," following laws of physiognomy that were unknown to doctors or painters either in Jesus' time or during the Middle Ages. Against those who suspect the stains are faked or late additions because they have remained reddish, Wilson calmly produces an expert on ancient DNA who says blood from a traumatic death can retain its tint for millenniums. Wilson's conclusion, based as well on the eerie three-dimensional quality of the image's photographic negative, is that it is not, as Bishop d'Arcis contended, a cunning painting. "To try to interpret it as the product of some unknown medieval faker seems rather like arguing for the Taj Mahal being a mere geological accident," he has written. It "must have come into contact with a real body."
This in itself does not contradict the radiocarbon-dating results, but other aspects of Wilson's research do, most notably a chronology that appears to track the shroud back long before 1260. Wilson finds several European references to what appears to be the shroud in the early 1200s. But more important, he seems, through historical detective work, to have connected it to something called the Edessa Cloth. A historically well-documented object of reverence in Constantinople for 350 years, the cloth disappeared when the Crusaders plundered the city in 1204. Most Byzantine witnesses described it as being a mystically precise likeness of Jesus' head. But Wilson cites a 13th century memoir by a French soldier, housed in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, that appears to describe it as a whole body ("there was the shroud in which Our Lord had been wrapped, which every Friday raised itself upright, so that one could see the figure of Our Lord on it"). Existing crease marks, says Wilson, explain the way in which today's shroud might be folded to display only the head but unfolded for the benefit of special viewers. He then creates a plausible chronology for the image extending backward to Edessa (located in central Turkey), where legend dates it to Jesus' era, and forward again via those larcenous Crusaders to Lirey, where its modern history begins. The time line, of course, contradicts the 1988 results. "All this inevitably gives rise to the question," Wilson writes in his new book, "Can anyone any longer be quite so sure of radiocarbon dating's claim 'conclusively' to have proved the shroud a medieval fake?... Is it not time, now, to look just a little more critically at the technique's own credibility?"
TAINTED SAMPLES? The strongest and most obvious technical critique of the radiocarbon dating, springing from an indisputable weakness in the testing procedure, is that since all three labs' specimens came from a single swatch of cloth, all would be affected if the swatch were atypical or contaminated. The mantra for this position, quoted fervently by shroud proponents who might otherwise have little to do with one another, is that "the tests could have been precise without being accurate." Chemist Alan Adler, an emeritus professor at Western Connecticut State University who has worked on the shroud, takes this possibility very seriously. "The sample used for dating," he asserts, "came from an area that is water-stained and scorched, and the edge is back-woven, indicating repair"--not from a clean portion, as the dating team insists. Adler says that infrared spectroscopy indicates that the sample's threads differ from those in the rest of the shroud. That doesn't guarantee, he hastens to acknowledge, that the sample was insufficiently testable and representative. But to be sure, he says, "you need more than one sample."
A related complaint was raised in 1993 by a Russian scientist named Dmitri Kouznetsov and enthusiastically supported by John Jackson, a physicist who was one of the leaders of the 1978 research team and is now co-director of the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado. Kouznetsov suggested that the radiocarbon dates had been thrown off by the entire shroud's exposure to a fire in 1532, which could have been expected to alter its carbon profile.
Radiocarbon experts, however, rebuff both sets of charges. Choosing an unbesmirched area was one of the most important decisions they could have made at the time. Says anthropologist R. Ervin Taylor, director of the radiocarbon-dating lab at the University of California at Riverside: "If they sampled in the wrong place, then they were idiots--and I know that's not the case." Geoscientist Paul Damon, a member of the University of Arizona team that tested one of the 1988 samples, hastens to say that the swatch was selected conscientiously and on the advice of textile experts. Contradicting Adler, he maintains, "We stayed away from charring and what might have been charred." Beyond that, the samples were cleaned both mechanically and chemically to rid them of contaminants. In fact, charring per se does not alter an object's carbon 14 ratio: scientists routinely use the method to date pieces of charcoal.
A DECEPTIVE COAT OF VARNISH? One challenge to the radiocarbon dating that has received a good deal of publicity is that of Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a San Antonio, Texas, pediatrician with interests in microbiology and archaeology. In 1983, while examining a Mayan jade artifact that art experts claimed was a recent forgery, Garza-Valdes discovered that it was covered by a lacquer-like coating produced by bacteria. Since it also had traces of ancient blood on it that should have been datable by the radiocarbon method, he took it to the University of Arizona dating lab, where scientists scraped off a sample of this natural "varnish" as well as the blood underneath it. They came up with a date of about A.D. 400--definitely not modern, but still 600 years younger than the carving's style suggested.
Several years later, when the three labs, the University of Arizona among them, produced their wet-blanket dates for the Turin shroud, a possibility flashed through Garza-Valdes' mind. What if the shroud too had a "bioplastic" varnish--and the labs had been fooled into decreeing an object younger than it actually was? In May 1993 Garza-Valdes traveled to Turin, microscope in hand, and was put in touch with Giovanni Riggi, the microanalyst who had parceled out the 1988 samples. Riggi let Garza-Valdes examine a tiny piece of shroud that he assured him came from the same batch. Sure enough, Garza-Valdes discovered a bioplastic film. "I knew immediately that the coating was there," he says. Riggi gave him a couple of threads and a bloodstain sample to take home.
Two years later, working with microbiologist Stephen Mattingly of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Garza-Valdes determined that the coating was embedded with "coccal-shaped bacteria and filamentous mold-like organisms." In some places, the coating increased the diameter of the fibers as much as 60%--which the two scientists say could be enough to skew the radiocarbon dating by 1,300 years. What is more, this coating--which is transparent and thus invisible to the naked eye--cannot be removed by the conventional cleaning methods of most radiocarbon labs. Properly cleaned, says Mattingly, "I think you'd find out the [shroud's] linen is much older, though I don't know by how much."
Garza-Valdes and Mattingly kept up their research for several years and then parted ways. "Dr. Garza's science was fine," says Mattingly, "but then he started talking about the Holy Grail, among other things." Garza-Valdes has speculated that some of the bacteria isolated from the shroud could be remnants from the vinegar Jesus was force-fed while on the Cross. "That's absurd," says Mattingly, who nonetheless continues to back the doctor's contention that the bioplastic coating exists on the shroud.
Predictably, the radiocarbon-dating crowd is dubious about Garza-Valdes' claims regarding the bioplastic film. Although he and Mattingly have reported on the topic itself, they have never published a peer-reviewed paper on their shroud work. "The only people who have ever seen these bacteria are Drs. Mattingly and Garza-Valdes," says Arizona's Timothy Jull. "In my opinion, our sample of the shroud was very clean, and there was no evidence of any coating." Even if the hypothetical varnish existed, Jull adds, the amount necessary to throw off the dating by 1,300 years would have been visible to the naked eye. Snipes U.C. Riverside's Taylor: "At the present time, the 'bioplastic theory' has many of the characteristics of cold fusion," the here-one-day-ridiculed-the-next physics fiasco of 1989.
THE IMAGE: DIVINE OR DEVISED? Those who see flaws in the radiocarbon-dating process rest their contentions on a thin precipice of evidence. In contrast, the question of how the image got on the shroud remains a legitimate and tantalizing scientific problem--and just as vulnerable to extrascientific exegesis. The image's most likely origin is an oxidation process akin to the natural aging of linen, but somehow accelerated in the fibers composing the "picture." Some have suggested that an enterprising artist could have created the image of a crucified man by daubing an acidic liquid (everything from sweat to lemon juice to sulfuric acid) on the cloth in the appropriate places and then exposing the material to heat. To attain a three-dimensional look, several investigators have suggested that a wet cloth was put over a bas-relief of a man and then burnished with iron oxides.
Throwing microbes into the mix would actually ease the production of an image. Says microbiologist Mattingly: "Imagine you've just come back from jogging and you're all sweaty, and you gently press a towel against your face. Now instead of throwing it into a corner, you set it carefully aside for several months. When you wiped your face, you transferred to the towel sweat, detritus and microbes that will grow and eventually form the image of a face."
Chemist Alan Adler, however, doubts that the oxidation was humanly induced. For one thing, the image is only one fiber deep. "If you lift a crossing fiber, you won't find any discoloration below," he says. The application of acids would not achieve such delicacy. Similarly, the fiber-by-microscopic-fiber gradations, even within a single thread, that make up the figure's exquisite "shading" would defy a human hand, were it engaged in either the application of acid or a rubbing process. Finally, Adler, a recognized expert on certain molecules found in blood, notes emphatically of the crimson stains and rivulets that ornament the shroud, "The blood is blood, and it came from a man who died a traumatic death." In fact, he says, both chemical analyses and a telltale yellow-green fluorescence under ultraviolet light indicate the presence of remains of a slightly different substance: the fluid exuded from blood clots. That substance and its invisible-to-the-naked-eye manifestation, he says, were unknown until the 20th century, so if a medieval artist did create the image, "he must have been a genius."
Like many other experts, Adler discounts a once popular theory that the bloodstains are composed of microscopic particles of reddish pigment, bound in a tempera medium. While it is possible that there are traces of pigment on the shroud, says historian Wilson, they are most likely flakes from copies of the image that were pressed onto the shroud in an attempt to rub off some of its sanctity. Adler believes the image must have been triggered by some sort of radiation process. But he stays away from speculation as to whether such radiation could have been divine in origin. "You can't go to the literature and find an explanation," says Adler. "Science can never authenticate this cloth, because there's no lab test for Christ-ness."
Which is not to say that some people haven't played with the possibility. In November, Doubleday plans to publish Garza-Valdes' provocatively titled The DNA of God? Scientifically, Garza-Valdes carefully hedges his statements about the shroud, saying only that "as of now, I have no reason to believe the Shroud of Turin is not the burial cloth of Jesus Christ" and that he thinks the blood on the shroud is human, male and ancient. In the early 1990s, Garza-Valdes asked Victor Tryon, director of the Center for Advanced DNA Technologies at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, to help him identify the organisms he believed were present in the shroud samples. To do so, he used a technique that enabled him to make millions of copies of the infinitesimally small segments of DNA contained in sticky-tape samples of the shroud.
Of the tests, Tryon says, "All I can tell you is that DNA contamination is present and that the DNA belonged either to a human or another higher primate. I have no idea who or where the DNA signal came from, nor how long it's been there." It is, he says, not necessarily the remains of blood. "Everyone who has ever touched the shroud or cried over the shroud has left a potential DNA signal there." Tryon quit the project soon after his tests. "I saw it as a multidisciplinary project involving archaeology, physiology and other fields. But I came to believe there was another agenda present too. It was my first encounter with zealotry in science."
LEAPS OF FAITH It is obviously within the realm of possibility that the radiocarbon tests on the Shroud of Turin were faulty. Although many of the attacks upon them verge on the crackpot, questions regarding the typicality of the sample swatch cannot be summarily dismissed. They are, moreover, unlikely to be settled soon. Far from being eager to hack another piece off his ever more delicate artifact for purposes of a radiocarbon rematch, Cardinal Saldarini called in all outstanding threads and samples without explanation two years ago, announcing only that the church would disown any testing on unreturned remnants. That is bad news, given 20th century humanity's ravenous hunger for literal certainty. Transubstantiation is well and good, but the tantalizing notion that the red spatters on linen are Christ's actual blood, rather than wine as blood, and that the imprint on cloth was left by the resurrected body, not a Communion wafer, is intoxicating.
That is why Marella Trabattoni, 32, will be in Turin, one of the 3 million visitors expected. The housewife will make the 90-mile drive from Milan with her husband Luca. They will bring along their two infant children. "Age doesn't make any difference for receiving grace," she notes. A few years ago, Trabattoni saw a videotape about the relic. The tape spent a few minutes on the results of the radiocarbon dating, mostly to disparage it. But what Trabattoni remembers is the details it pointed out in the cloth. "The wounds on the shoulders," she explains, "the wounds from the flogging, the wounds on the knees. And there was one thing I remember very distinctly that touched me very much. There was a professor of medicine who studied the shroud and said the point at which the nails were driven in was a very painful place. Every movement this person had to make in order to breathe made him suffer more. All these details make me absolutely positive that it's genuine." She says with a revitalized faith, "The person was Christ."
Personally, Arizona's Damon is getting a little tired of that attitude. "The problem with dating the shroud is that you're in the realm of religion rather than science," he complains. Instead of going over the same ground again and again, he would prefer to resume his current research on global warming.
Can Marella Trabattoni and Paul Damon be reconciled? Perhaps not; they inhabit different worlds. But it is worth noting that the church, which has been dealing with such issues for centuries, has a clear policy on relics, notwithstanding John Paul's private opinion on the shroud. They are to be venerated, not worshipped; valued not for their own divinity but because they turn believers' souls toward that which is truly holy. At the time of the radiocarbon dating, Peter Rinaldi, an American priest known as "Mr. Shroud" for his devotion to the linen sheet, wrote several letters to other devotees. In one he quoted St. Paul: "Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth." In another Rinaldi explicated, "If the shroud does have a meaning, it is because it speaks to us of his sufferings as no other image does...at best the shroud is only a sign of our faith and hope in Christ. He and he alone is our greatest and dearest possession."
And for Christians worldwide--including those now wending their way toward Turin--if the shroud were proved absolutely, indisputably medieval tomorrow, he would remain sufficient.
--Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York and Greg Burke and Martin Penner/Rome
With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York and Greg Burke and Martin Penner/Rome