“Christian couples should be aware that they are called to sanctity themselves and to sanctify others, that they are called to be apostles and that their first apostolate is in the home. They should understand that founding a family, educating their children, and exercising a Christian influence in society, are supernatural tasks. The effectiveness and the success of their life — their happiness — depends to a great extent on their awareness of their specific mission.”
The Shroud is being displayed in Turin right now, and will be for the next 7 weeks. This Shroud fascinates me, as I'm sure it does many billions of people. National Geographic Italia recently wrote an article about it.
Why Shroud of Turin's Secrets Continue
to Elude Science
As the venerated relic goes on public exhibition, its origin remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma
By Frank Viviano, National Geographic
PUBLISHED
The 53-square-foot rectangle of linen known as the Shroud of Turin is one of the most sacred religious icons on Earth, venerated by millions of Christians as the actual burial garment of Jesus Christ.
It is also among the most fiercely debated subjects in contemporary science, an extraordinary mystery that has defied every effort at solution.
Over the 117 years since a photographic negative of the linen unexpectedly revealed the image of a tortured body, ranks of physicists and chemists have weighed in on the fabric’s age and the image’s composition. Forensic pathologists, microbiologists, and botanists have analyzed its bloodstains, along with specks of dirt and pollen on its surface. Statisticians have combed through mountains of data.
The sum result is a standoff, with researchers unable to dismiss the shroud entirely as a forgery, or prove that it is authentic. “It is unlikely science will provide a full solution to the many riddles posed by the shroud,” Italian physicist Paolo Di Lazzaro, a leading expert on the phenomenon, told National Geographic. “A leap of faith over questions without clear answers is necessary—either the ‘faith’ of skeptics, or the faith of believers.”
On April 19, the shroud goes on public display at Turin’s cathedral for seven weeks, its longest exhibition in modern history.
To readers of the New Testament gospels, the mysterious man of the shroud evokes the slain Christ, complete with signs of scourging, crucifixion, and puncture wounds caused by a crown of thorns.
The Scientific Record
Scientific inquiry into the shroud began in 1898, with the startling image captured by Italian amateur photographer Secondo Pia. Under normal conditions, only the vague sepia blur of a human body appears on the fabric. But when Pia examined the reverse negative of his photographic plate in the darkroom, he discovered the detailed likeness of a bearded man with visible wounds on his body.
For seven decades, indirect analyses of the image were conducted by researchers, most aimed at determining whether it had been painted onto the linen or produced through contact with a human corpse. It wasn’t until 1969 that scientists were allowed to examine the fabric directly, with the task of advising on preservation techniques and future testing. This set the scene for the establishment of the U.S.-led Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), which was granted an unprecedented five days of continuous access to the shroud itself in 1978.
The project’s 33 members ran the gamut of scientific disciplines, and their credentials included high-level posts at 20 major research institutions. They arrived in Turin with seven tons of equipment and worked in shifts 24 hours a day. An associate team of European scientists acted as expert observers.
Their analyses found no sign of artificial pigments. “The Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist,” the project’s 1981 report declared. “The blood stains are composed of hemoglobin and also give a positive test for serum albumin.” But the report also conceded that no combination of “physical, chemical, biological or medical circumstances” could adequately account for the image.
The Shroud of Turin, the STURP team concluded, “remains now, as it has in the past, a mystery.”
The Carbon-14 Bombshell
In 1988, the Vatican authorized carbon-14 dating of the shroud. Small samples from a corner of its fabric were sent to labs at the University of Oxford’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (RAU), the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. All three found that the shroud material dated to the years between 1260 and 1390, more than a millennium after the life and death of the historical Jesus. The labs assessed the reliability of their estimate at 95 percent. To make the case even more convincing, the dates closely coincided with the first documentedappearance of the Shroud of Turin in 1353.
Since their release 27 years ago, the carbon-14 dating results have become the focal point of the shroud controversy, with a stream of critics taking aim at its methodology and conclusions.
Among the most innovative critiques were those published in 2010 by statisticians Marco Riani, of the University of Parma in Italy, and Anthony Atkinson, of the London School of Economics. In a recent interview with National Geographic, they noted that the laboratories conducting the carbon-14 tests were in full agreement on the ages of control fabrics from an ancient Egyptian mummy, a medieval Nubian tomb, and a medieval French ecclesiastical vestment. Yet raw data from the same tests on the shroud yielded results that differed by more than 150 years.
The published carbon-14 findings were the mean results drawn from the combined data of the three labs. It was assumed that the data were “homogeneous”—near-identical age estimates based on repeated measurements of the samples, each of which had been divided into four segments for testing.
But when computers crunched through all 387,072 ways to cut the samples, they identified a marked pattern of variations. “The dating which comes from a piece at the top edge [of an uncut sample] is very different from the date which comes from a piece taken from the bottom edge,” Riani explains.
“Our research does not prove that the shroud is authentic, nor that it is 2,000 years old,” he cautions. But it does call into question the carbon-14 report’s assertion of “conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval.” The Oxford lab insists that the 1988 conclusions were accurate, and rejects arguments that the test samples were flawed.
The Question of Questions
Looming above all other issues is what physicist Paolo Di Lazzaro calls “the question of questions”: how the image was produced, regardless of its age. Every scientific attempt to replicate it in a lab has failed. Its precise hue is highly unusual, and the color’s penetration into the fabric is extremely thin, less than 0.7 micrometers (0.000028 inches), one-thirtieth the diameter of an individual fiber in a single 200-fiber linen thread. Di Lazzaro and his colleagues at Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) conducted five years of experiments, using state-of-the-art excimer lasers to train short bursts of ultraviolet light on raw linen, in an effort to simulate the image’s coloration. The ENEA team, which published its findings in 2011, came tantalizingly close to approximating the image’s distinctive hue on a few square centimeters of fabric. But they were unable to match all the physical and chemical characteristics of the shroud image. Nor could they reproduce a whole human figure. The ultraviolet light necessary to do so “exceeds the maximum power released by all ultraviolet light sources available today,” says Di Lazzaro. It would require “pulses having durations shorter than one forty-billionth of a second, and intensities on the order of several billion watts.”
If the most advanced technologies available in the 21st century could not produce a facsimile of the shroud image, he reasons, how could it have been executed by a medieval forger?
For believers, the radiation thesis suggests that a “divine light” in the tomb might have seared the crucified form of Jesus Christ onto the shroud. “One could look at hypotheses outside the realm of science, a sort of miracle,” says Di Lazzaro. “But a miracle cannot be investigated by the scientific method.”
Read the rest by clicking the magazine cover above.
So, yesterday I went to Adoration. This was admittedly maybe the 2nd or 3rd time in my whole life I'd participated in such a thing, and the first time in a church for an entire hour, with only myself and Jesus in the form of a consecrated host present. It gave me time to pray - the rosary, the liturgy of the hours, and just straight from the heart stuff - and time to meditate. It was peaceful, there in the quiet church. Quiet is not a luxury I get to experience very often, and I sometimes forget how powerful it can be.
I sat there, staring at the host, and then at the large crucifix above it, at the life-sized statue of Jesus on the cross. And I got to thinking. Those two things. Were they same thing? Really? This piece of bread? My head has examined the evidence time and again. And I have come to the conclusion, in my head, that... if I believe what the Bible says, if I believe what Jesus himself says in John 6, and I believe what the historical church has taught from it's very inception 2000 years ago, then this most astounding thing is fact. The bread IS Jesus. Logically, I know this most illogical thing is truth. I can't seem to rationalize it away. Theologically, the Real Presence also makes perfect sense to me. I've written about it time and again, and I understand that I NEED the real, actual presence and person of Jesus inside of me, so that I may take Him on, so that I may abide in Him as He abides in me. And I read the Bible, and I see the Old Testament foreshadowing, the preparation, for this most sacred of mysteries, and.... I get it. In my head, I "get" the Eucharist.
But it's different when you're there, sitting, in the quiet. With the bread and the crucifix juxtaposed so closely together. My head is there. Is my heart? Sitting in a quiet church alone can make a person feel close to Jesus. The stained glass, the candles, the altar, the statues. All of it. The house of God, in and of itself, seems to be a little gateway to Heaven. But it was different with the host exposed. Honestly, I was a little nervous. There was a tangible presence there, and even though I consume the host every Sunday, it felt as if I had a private audience with Someone that I'd previously only known in a "group setting". Silly. But true. A first date, if you will.
My time there at adoration made me think back to the Miracle of Lanciano, and the Miracle of Buenos Aires. 1400 years ago, a priest celebrating mass in Italy had similar doubts. Was this bread REALLY Jesus? And there, before his eyes, the bread turned into flesh. And it's still there, sitting in a church in Italy:
In Buenos Aires, in 1996, another Eucharistic Miracle took place in the diocese run by then Bishop Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis. A host that had fallen to the ground was placed in a glass of water to dissolve. Instead, it grew into flesh.
The scientific studies on both of these occurrences fascinate me.
In 1971, Odoardo Linoli (an Italian professor of anatomy and pathological histology) studied the Lanciano miracle. His research was published in "Quaderni Sclavo di Diagnostica Clinica e di Laboratori" at the time. I have a copy of the full article, in Italian. Luckily, Google translates things for me. Dr. Linoli concluded the following:
"A description has been given of the macroscopic aspects of the Flesh and the Blood of the Eucharistic Miracle which happened in Lanciano back in the eighth century. Histological studies have been carried out with the following results: Flesh is composed of mesodermal tissue and recognizable as heart tissue, myocardium and endocardium. Several studies on Blood, in particular thin layer chromatography, allowed to recognize it as belonging to Blood. The human nature of the ancient Blood and Flesh in Lanciano was identified immunologically by Uhlenhuth's zonal precipitation reaction. The Blood group in elution fluids of the ancient Blood and Flesh is the same in both tissues (AB group). The electrophoretic tracings of serum proteins of the ancient Blood show quite superimposable pattern to those obtained with a fresh serum. In the ancient Blood low amounts of sodium, potassium, chloride, non organic phosphorus and magnesium were found while calcium levels were increased."
So, human heart tissue, and blood type AB.
The Buenos Aires sample was studied by Dr. Frederick Zugibe, an expert in forensic medicine. He found that the sample he was given (he had no idea his sample had come from a consecrated host) could be "identified as a fragment of the heart muscle, which due to the large amount of white blood cells and the inflamed condition of the sample must have been taken from a living heart that had suffered a great stress situation."
The sample was also studied by Neuropsychopharmacology Physiologist Castañon Ricardo Gomez from Bolivia, who sent part of the sample to the Analytical Forensic Institute in San Francisco. "The Institute noted that it was human blood, confirming the previous studies. The DNA code is uniquely human. The samples were also sent to Professor John Walker of the University of Sydney in Australia. Independently of any other studies it was found that the muscle cells and white blood cells originate from a human and are perfectly intact. The studies also showed that the tissue was inflamed, which means that the person to whom it belongs, had suffered a trauma. In 2003, Walker told Castañon that the samples comply with an infected male, according to the signs also still alive according to the state of the heart."
Further comparisons of the two samples, 1300 years apart in age, and half a world away in distance, showed the following:
"The comparison showed that the studied samples come from the same person in both cases. The blood type is AB + for each, which occurs in about five percent of all people worldwide. The DNA is the same in the both cases. In addition, there are features that the man came from the Middle East. Further comparisons showed the same agreement with the grave cloth of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo."
HELLO!!
That's bombshell stuff, people. I don't need miracles to believe in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but if I DID? Bombshell. Stuff. Big time.
And sitting there at church yesterday, in the quiet presence, praying and meditating in front of the host staring back at me from the altar, time flew by much quicker than I'd expected it would. By the end of that mere 60 minutes, I knew. Not just in my head. But in my heart. How it happens, I have no idea. It's a miracle each and every time it does. Ordinary bread. No longer ordinary. REAL.
So often, I feel more like the Magi than the Shepherds at the Nativity. Instead of rushing to the feet of Jesus, dropping everything and just GOING, I think, I ponder, I calculate, I think again. I get there. Slowly, deliberately, maybe getting sidetracked along the way. If I simply took what I was taught, if I had the faith of the simple, the children, I would get there much sooner. If I was a shepherd, I'd be there right away. But I am the magi. And thankfully, the Lord accepts me, too.
I am not worthy. SO not worthy of this gift.
"But only say the word, and my soul shall be healed. "
