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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."