Saturday, May 10, 1997

Whether genuine or not, Shroud of Turin inspires deep faith

By Carol McGraw / The Orange County Register

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. - Mary Reich looks like she is going to cry. But her eyes don't waver from the startling image of a gaunt bearded man glowing on the wall in this dimly lighted room.

Even from afar, the gory wounds of a crucified man are haunting. There are thorn marks and pooled blood on his forehead. His eyes are swollen. Both his front and back are shown in anatomical detail. Back, chest and shoulders are covered with lacerations. He has been speared. His shoulders are rubbed raw. There are nail gouges in his wrists.

Reich turns her head slowly. On every wall there are life-size backlit transparencies of the Shroud of Turin. Some consider this centuries-old linen to be the burial cloth of Jesus.

"Seeing this, you realize the real one couldn't be a fake. It isn't," she whispers insistently into the tomblike quiet of the Shroud Center of California, in Huntington Beach.

The shroud's authenticity has been argued for centuries. Some believe that cataclysmic radiation from the Resurrection of Jesus burned the image into the cloth. Others insist it is a clever fake.

Despite the ferocious debate that swirls around this religious artifact, there are millions of Christians worldwide who find in it an inspiration. For them it symbolizes the agony of the Crucifixion and the ecstasy of the Resurrection.

What fascinates even those not swayed by religious fervor is that despite thousands of hours of research, modern science has yet to determine just how this image got there. While records of the cloth's existence first cropped up in the 1300s, it wasn't until the first photos were taken in 1898 that modern researchers realized that it resembles a photographic image. To the naked eye the image is a faint likeness. But as a negative, the man on the shroud jumps into startling relief.

"It's inspiring to my faith," Reich says, explaining why she has driven more than 100 miles in rush-hour traffic to see these transparencies at the Huntington Beach museum. Dr. August Accetta, a Newport Beach, Calif., gynecologist, opened the shroud museum last year.

Reich, of Northridge, Calif., has brought along a framed photograph of the shroud to show the museum staff. Her late grandmother purchased it for $1 from a monastery more than 60 years ago. Reich says, "It touches something so deep."

Even those not spiritually inspired have been mystified by the 14-foot-long piece of linen now locked in a silver casket behind gates above the altar in St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Turin, Italy.

All four of the New Testament Gospels and other, nonbiblical writings mention such a burial linen, though nothing with an image on it. The first recorded mention of a shroud with an image was in 1325 in Lirey, France, in reference to a relic owned by an aristocratic family.

It later became the property of the House of Savoy, Italy's royal family. The shroud survived a chapel fire in 1532, and nuns patched more than a score of burn spots. The shroud was bequeathed to the Roman Catholic Church in 1983.

The church has placed it on public display only twice in this century, in 1931 and 1978. Both times, millions made the pilgrimage to Turin, Italy. Elvis Presley is said to have been reading a book about the shroud in his bathroom when he died.

Many thought the shroud issue was dead and buried in 1988, when scientists conducted carbon-dating tests and found it to be less than 700 years old. But almost immediately, some researchers criticized the tests' accuracy, and the Vatican left the door open to more testing.

Michael Shermer, Occidental College professor and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, says that the carbon dating didn't satisfy everyone, because "They don't want to be satisfied."

"Spiritual hope springs eternal," Shermer said. "The ironic thing is that believers are supposed to come on faith, but the fact is we want evidence. So here comes a burial cloth, and wow, it can't get better than that.

"For all the world it looks like Jesus. But the problem is, we don't know what Jesus looks like."

Nevertheless, he says, "It's exciting and titillating, and for some the mystery of the image is more interesting than the shroud itself."

And so the mystery lives. This spring, as in past, a new crop of shroud books have appeared like Easter lillies. The Shroud Center in Huntington Beach is enjoying steady business. Pilgrims from Orange County and around the world are already making plans to journey to Italy in 1998 and 2000, when the Shroud will be displayed again.

Like the JFK assassination plots, the shroud has grown a life of its own, generating legends, plots and amazing theories to explain its existence.

"It's a relic that refuses to lie down," says author Lynn Pickett, whose book "Turin Shroud" theorizes that the image was made by Leonardo da Vinci, creating the world's first photograph.

Fake religious relics proliferated in the late Middle Ages, the time period pinpointed by the carbon dating, says Fay Martineau, Harvard Divinity School doctoral candidate whose expertise is medieval Christianity.

At least 40 shrouds have shown up, some crudely painted replicas of the Turin Shroud and others easy to spot as fakes. In the Middle Ages, there were enough "genuine" slivers from the cross to make a forest. Mouthsful of teeth and at least a half-dozen foreskins, all supposedly belonging to Christ, were displayed in churches. Even dozens of donkey shinbones were touted as belonging to the animal Jesus rode into Jerusalem.

"People have a need to hold or touch or see something that belongs to the power that they believe in," Martineau says.

The Roman Catholic Church has never officially recognized the shroud as a relic, but it has not discouraged such thinking, either. Even after the 1988 carbon dating, Pope John Paul II said, "If it weren't a relic, one could not understand these reactions of faith that surround it and that express themselves even more strongly because of the scientific results."

The Rev. Fabian Richards of Saint Angela Merici Catholic Church in Brea says he found the shroud inspirational. He was studying in Italy in 1978 when a professor invited him to view it.

"My faith was strengthened by the witness rendered there - the physiognomy of the man in the shroud. The nailed wrists and feet. The side wounds. The scourge marks. It was a rendering of the Passion narrative."

However, he adds, "I don't say this is it. I delight in the doubt that surrounds it. Scientifically it's a puzzle. It doesn't lend itself to devotionalism. But it doesn't detract from faith. I see it as a fifth Gospel, because it offers testimony to his suffering."

The Rev. Joseph Marino, a shroud historian, says the shroud is "probably the most intensely studied artifact in human history."

It was a book on the shroud that persuaded him 20 years ago to set aside his agnosticism and become a Benedictine monk. Marino, librarian at St. Louis Abbey in Missouri, is not concerned by lack of historical record. He says, "Most museum artifacts do not have clear, complete histories."

But even if one does not believe the shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus, the tantalizing mystery remains, as one theory after another is shot down.

Walter McCrone, a member of the so-called Shroud Crowd of researchers, knew what was going to happen when he found traces of iron oxide on the shroud, indicating paint might have been used.

"I have good and bad news," he said at the time. "The bad news is that it is a fake. The good news is that nobody is going to believe me."

He was right. Detractors said the iron oxide could have been a manufacturing byproduct of the linen.

More than 600,000 recorded hours of research have been logged by physicists, chemists, anatomists, forensic experts, botanists, microbiologists, photographers, artists and archaeologists. And many of them believe that the shroud did once cover a dead body, but the question of whose body has not been answered.

One enterprising surgeon in the 1930s hacked the arms off corpses to demonstrate that crucified bodies can be supported only by nails through the wrists, as is the case of the image on the shroud.

Another Shroudie used tape to pull pollen samples off the shroud, and identified them as coming from plants found in Palestine.

One scientist suggested that the image was created when bacteria on the cadaver that was wrapped in the shroud ate into the linen.

Catholic novelist Tom Monteleone, in his book "Blood of the Lamb," created an international thriller in which scientists used a drop of blood from the shroud to clone Jesus. In real life, scientists have not been allowed to do DNA tests to determine the ethnicity of the shroud blood. But even if such testing were done, scientists note that the DNA of thousands of people, those who have touched and even kissed the shroud, would also have impregnated the linen.

But just about every other test has been conducted, including X-rays, ultraviolet rays, infrared spectroscopy.

Researchers have probed every inch of the linen, noting every detail, and theorized at length on the meaning of it all: the three-dimensional image, the figure's lack of a navel, the seemingly modest positioning of the hands over genitals, the unusual angle of the sole of the foot, the smallish head, the image having no ears or temples and the eyes seeming too far on the outside edge of the face, that the blood trails pool exactly as real blood might have.

Many find it significant that the shroud has attracted intense interest from two disciplines often at odds with each other, theology and science.

"It's a dandy scientific problem and an important contribution to religion," says John Jackson, a Colorado physicist who led a team of some 30 scientists who did extensive tests on the shroud in Italy in 1978. A Catholic, he says he has devoted his life to research on it because "it could hold the answer to the greatest mystery of all - our own mortality."

Los Angeles artist Isabel Pi-czek for nearly a decade has studied the body position of the man depicted on the shroud. A religious artist, she has painted murals for churches worldwide, including Holy Family Cathedral in Orange. It was her work that pointed out the foreshortening of limbs, which shored up the crucifixion argument. The shroud man's body is arched as if he had been on a cross and rigor mortis had set in before he was wrapped in the shroud.

"I did not set out to prove it authentic," Piczek said. "I'm Catholic, but whether the shroud is real or not has nothing do do with my faith."

Randall Bresee, University of Tennessee textile professor, reproduced a shroud image by drawing with solid material on paper. He used a so-called dusting technique that left no brush strokes, then transferred the image to cloth, by laying fabric on top of the drawing and rubbing it with a spoon. Others criticized it as not having enough of a three-dimensional image.

But of all the tests done in the past 100 years, none have been more damaging to the credibility of the shroud story than has carbon dating.

The intrigue behind that test began in the mid-'80s when an Anglican priest approached Harry Gove, a University of Rochester physicist, with the idea. Gove had just developed accelerator mass spectrometry, a type of carbon dating that drastically reduced the amount of sample needed.

Carbon dating makes use of all living organisms maintaining a certain level of radioactive carbon. When the organism dies, the radioactive carbon decays over time at a predictable ratio, making dating of the organism possible.

Gove and others spent a decade trying to get church approval for the carbon tests, even meeting in 1986 with Pope John Paul II. He says of his experiences, "It was an amazing adventure fraught with politics."

They eventually hammered out the test protocols, including use of seven laboratories and blind testing. In the end, there was no true blind testing since scientists were too familiar with the peculiar herringbone weave on the shroud. And the church allowed only three labs to test it. Gove's pioneering lab was bypassed; he says that was because "I was not diplomatic enough with church officials."

The three test labs, which measured the age of the flax used to make the linen, determined a probable date of 1325, give or take 33 years.

Gove, a former Episcopalian who doesn't attend church, says the shroud brought moral questions into the scientific laboratory.

"It's a gorgeous object. It inspires deep feelings of faith, and I wondered if I shouldn't leave it alone. I wondered whether this was a proper role for science to play."

Some critics maintain that two fires the shroud endured centuries ago could have skewed the carbon dating.

The latest attack on carbon dating came just months ago, when a University of Texas team presented a paper to the Society of Microbiology suggesting that a microscopic layer of bacteria and fungi could have thrown the date off hundreds or possibly thousands of years.

But like all things related to the shroud, that is not the last word. Professor Paul Damon, one of the Arizona scientists who did the carbon dating, says there were flaws in the Texas study.

A Quaker, Damon says he was rather amazed that the shroud issue didn't die after the carbon tests. He says much of the criticism comes from those "who want their Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame."

Gove, who viewed the Arizona tests, also attests to their accuracy. And he says, tiredly, "I've learned more about the Crucifixion than I ever wanted to know."

(c) 1997, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).

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