Shroud of Faith

Here’s how badly Dr. August David Accetta wants to prove the Shroud of Turin is Jesus Christ’s burial cloth: He once injected himself with nuclear medicine to try to show radiation emitted from a human--like a flash from a resurrection--could produce a similar image.

Not so surprising, really, considering this ob-gyn spends $20,000 to $30,000 of his own money each year to subsidize his 2-year-old museum in Huntington Beach, the Shroud Center of Southern California.

The shroud goes on view in Santa Giovanni de Battista cathedral in Turin today, and more than 3 million people are expected to walk past the 14-by-3 1/2-foot cloth that is either a fake or the image of Jesus.

Accetta is traveling the 6,000 miles to Italy to see the shroud, bringing several members of his family along for the May 9 viewing, the first public viewing of the mysterious cloth in two decades. The tickets are so precious that they are with him at all times--even tucked in his pale green doctor’s smock as he makes his scheduled appointments.

“It’s very hard to get one of these tickets, so I’m sort of protecting them,” he said.

But Accetta’s three-room museum, which sits in an office building at 18351 Beach Blvd. filled mainly with real estate brokers, is as close as most people will get to the shroud. Inside are X-rays seeking to prove the shroud’s authenticity, full-size photos of the cloth, blowups of pollen taken from the shroud and even a lance like the one a Roman soldier is said to have used to pierce Christ during his crucifixion. The museum is staffed by volunteers and attracts about 10 visitors a day. Admission is $7 for adults and $3 for children.

“There hasn’t been a day in the last 10 years when I haven’t studied or promoted the shroud in some way,” he said. “I work harder and harder on it. It’s exhausting.”

The shroud is “the most intensely studied object of modern science,” Accetta said, and the controversy over its authenticity won’t go away despite numerous scientific studies. The yellow linen cloth, which surfaced in the Middle Ages, shows what appears to be a bearded man with a ponytail, with markings that believers say correspond to Christ’s wounds--marks on his head, stigmata on his wrist and feet and a severe wound on his right side.

At various times, prominent Catholic figures, even a pope, have denounced the shroud as a fraud. After sophisticated radiocarbon tests in 1988, scientists said it originated between 1260 to 1390. That seemed to put an end to the controversy. After all, the faking of religious relics is not unknown.

But since then, the debate has been reborn as some have argued that the pieces of the shroud that the three labs tested were contaminated.

Susan Trumbore, an associate professor of Earth sciences at UC Irvine who was on a team that tested the shroud, dismisses the criticism. “I’m confident I dated a piece of the Shroud of Turin, and the age of it was only 600 years instead of 2,000 years,” she said.

The Catholic Church has not taken a position on the shroud, but the majority of scholars for the church now believe it is the real thing, said Msgr. Lawrence Baird, spokesman for the Diocese of Orange.

Even if the shroud is phony, though, scientists can’t figure out how it was produced. “We know everything about this cloth but how it got there,” Accetta said.

Accetta, 38, is a man of science who doesn’t believe in evolution and whose faith includes the virgin birth. He speaks excitedly about the shroud and quotes Scripture. He visibly tires when talking about himself but then perks up again when the conversation returns to the relic. He calls his work “a ministry.”

Accetta grew up Roman Catholic but became an agnostic, then attended a fundamentalist church with his wife. But he credits his shroud study with bringing him back to the church.

Accetta became interested in the shroud as a teenager in 1974 after reading books and magazine articles on the subject. He thought little about it as he went off to college and medical school. Then in about 1989, he heard about a shroud research center in North Carolina. After a visit there, he read everything he could find about the shroud.

“After three years, I ran out of reasons not to accept its authenticity,” he said.

He accumulated more and more material on the shroud, and the 7 1/2-foot-high photos of the shroud now in the museum were sitting in his living room. He had to find somewhere to put his collection. “I ran out of room in my house,” he said. That led to the museum.

He has traveled to Turin once before, but all he could see was the closed silver chest containing the shroud, covered by the red cloth that Princess Clotilde of Savoy sewed in 1868.

Accetta hopes that someday the church will once again open the shroud up to scientific study, and that he will be included. After all, his study with the nuclear medicine showed radiation emitted from the body provides the best explanation for the image on the shroud.

“If it’s science that led us away from God, it should be science that leads us to God.”