On View After 20 Years, Shroud Draws Throngs

Like a quiet river, the pilgrims flow through the cathedral by the tens of thousands each day. They stop for exactly two minutes to contemplate the faint traces of a bearded man’s face, limbs and folded hands on a yellowing sheet hung in the nave.

They stand in silence, some in tears, then exit on cue. No wailing, no pushing. This is not Lourdes or Fatima, where the sick pray for miracle cures. This is the Shroud of Turin, now on display for the first time in two decades and beheld by many Roman Catholics as a miracle in itself. Even Italy’s ubiquitous mobile phones are obediently switched off in its presence.

As orderly as all this seems, the pilgrimage is an act of rebellion.

Ten years after carbon-14 dating tests led scientists to place its origin between 1262 and 1390, many of those flocking here still assert that the shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. His image, they believe, was fused onto it by a divine burst of energy when he rose from the dead.

“My faith is not based on mathematical proof but on the grace of God, who leaves us free to decide,” Giulio Caiusi, a 35-year-old Italian banker, said outside the cathedral. “What I see on the shroud is the blood of a man who died on a cross. The wounds coincide in a striking way with the gospel’s account of the crucifixion.”

Whether a medieval fake or a “snapshot of the Resurrection,” as one scholar calls it, the shroud has become one of the most studied artifacts in history and a symbol of the duel between science and religious faith.

A Million Visitors

More than a million people, including Pope John Paul II, have come to see the linen cloth since April 18, when it was removed from its silver casket, unrolled and displayed horizontally in a bulletproof glass case for viewing until June 14. With 800,000 more already having reserved a viewing time, Turin’s Catholic archdiocese expects the total to approach the record 3 million who came in 1978, before science cast the most serious doubt on the cloth’s origin.

The shroud’s reappearance has coincided with--and fueled--a backlash against the carbon-14 findings. The revisionists are pressing their views in cyberspace and in a spate of new books that debate every detail and theory of the cloth’s history.

“There are a lot of closet shroud people out there, many of them in the sciences, who are saying, ‘Wait, they made some definitive claims on the basis of tests that might be flawed, so let’s reexamine the evidence,’ ” says Barrie M. Schwortz, a Los Angeles researcher whose own Web site surveys 23 other sites devoted to sindonology, the study of the shroud.

“To some extent, religious motivation is pushing the issue, but science itself is also part of it,” he said. “And right now, science is pretty much divided pro and con.”

The pope declared Sunday that the shroud’s origin is still an open question. After kneeling and praying before it, he called the cloth “a challenge to our intelligence . . . an image that everyone can see but no one can yet explain.”

Repeating the long-held stand that the church lacks competence to rule on such questions, the pope urged scientists to continue studying the shroud, “without preconceived positions” and with respect for “scientific methodology and the sensibility of the faithful.”

The shroud has been a mystery since its first documented description, in 1349, when Geoffrey de Charny, a French knight back from the Crusades, reported to the Vatican that he had found a burial cloth bearing the features of Christ.

Forty years later, a French bishop declared the shroud a “cunningly painted” fraud. Even so, the cloth, which moved to Turin from France in 1578, continued to draw pilgrims.

Scientific scrutiny intensified after the first photograph of the shroud, in 1898, exposed the ghostly image with far greater clarity than had been visible to the eye. In 1978, researchers announced after five days of testing by X-ray, chemical analysis and thermography that the shroud had cloaked a human body and that its brownish stains were probably blood.

‘Very Frightening’

Dorothy Crispino, a rural Indiana homemaker, was drawn to the shroud in 1972 after seeing a photograph of the tormented face on it. She came here for the 1978 exhibition and began publishing Spectrum, a sindonology journal, three years later.

“You just feel that you are encountering Jesus in person, and that can be a very frightening experience,” says Crispino, 82, who is back in Turin to face the shroud again and arrange visits for other Americans.

Her journal lost subscribers and ceased publication in 1993 after the carbon-dating test dampened the shroud’s mystique, but her own faith never wavered.

She and other die-hard believers became known on the Internet as “shroudies,” a label coined by their detractors.

Insisting that her faith is grounded in science, Crispino cites numerous scholars, led by Colorado physicist John Jackson, who have challenged the carbon-dating. They hold that the shroud’s carbon levels may have been altered by exposure to a 1532 fire or by a bioplastic coating of microorganisms that attached themselves to the cloth in this century.

And last year, scientists at the University of Jerusalem reported that the cloth had traces of pollen from flowers that grow only in the Middle East--bolstering the view that it came from the Holy Land and is not a European fake.

“No doubt about it,” Crispino concludes flatly. “It’s an authentic burial cloth of a crucified man, and that man is Jesus Christ.”

That kind of certainty disturbs Paul Damon, professor emeritus of geoscience at the University of Arizona. He was a member of one of the three independent teams that did the carbon-dating and reached the same conclusion, which he defends to this day.

“It’s kind of scary, in this century, with all the advance of science, that people still hold firmly to these beliefs,” Damon says, equating the “shroudies” with creationists, who reject Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The shroud, adds the scientist, who is a Quaker, “is a remarkable image--something that cannot help but inspire awe, even though it was a work of art. . . . Who was the artist? What was the technique? It would make an interesting dissertation on art history.”

Faced with strong opposing views, the Vatican, to which the shroud was bequeathed by Italy’s former royal House of Savoy in 1983, has moved to quiet the scientific debate. Cardinal Giovanni Saldarini, Turin’s archbishop and the shroud’s custodian, has halted further testing until after 2000, when the cloth will be displayed again.

Instead, he stresses the Vatican teaching that the shroud should not be worshiped as sacred but venerated as a symbol--authentic or not--of the Crucifixion. “Too much is asked about whether the shroud is real and not enough about the passion of Christ,” he says.

Human Endurance

Some pilgrims agree that veracity isn’t important.

“We see crucifixes as Catholics all our lives, and sometimes they can become something sterile,” says David Toups, an American priest studying in Rome. “Whether it’s Christ or not, which I personally believe it is, the shroud reminds us what a human endures when his body is ripped apart.”

But a mystical belief in the power of the shroud endures--and got a boost in April last year when fire destroyed much of the chapel built to house it. Firefighter Mario Trematore has spoken widely about “a force in the cloth” that gave him strength to break three layers of bulletproof glass and carry the shroud, in its case, to safety.

“That force was the faith of millions of believers, not my own; I knew I had to save the shroud for them, not for me,” he recalled in an interview, as if the dramatic rescue had just happened. “Before then, I was an indifferent Catholic, but that moment changed my life. When I carried away the shroud in its silver case, it was incredibly light, like a newborn child. I felt like the donkey carrying Jesus into Jerusalem.”

The firefighter has joined the river of pilgrims to the shroud seven times in the past month. Does he believe it’s Christ’s burial cloth?

“Yes, yes,” he said. “They don’t pay me enough to risk my life for any old sheet.”