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And yet a sort of resurrection has occurred. Counterintuitive as it may seem in an age when technology has either trumped belief or become its new focus, a fascination with the shroud seems to have not only survived but also flourished. It can be tracked on the World Wide Web, from the official archdiocese site to the home page of the Turin fire brigade (which saved the relic during a fire last April). It can be discussed at the Centre International d'Etudes sur le Linceul de Turin in Paris, the Collegamento pro Sindone in Rome (sindon is the Latin word for shroud), Valencia's Centro Espanol de Sindonologia or with the members of variously titled organizations in England and the U.S., whose members happily refer to themselves as "shroudies." It finds its adherents among everyday Catholics and among the exalted as well: during an in-flight press conference in 1989 on his way to Madagascar, when asked if he believed the shroud to be genuine, John Paul II replied, "I think it is."
What is most striking about the resurgent interest may be not its persistence but its aggressiveness. It appears to have bred that rare 20th century phenomenon, the refusal to accept what under other circumstances would be considered a foregone scientific conclusion. On Website after Website, in book after much hyped book and in the Turin Cathedral this week, an act of rebellion is under way. It is not as sweeping as the creationists' jihad against Darwin, but it is also far more focused: what is under attack here is not a vast theory with admitted gaps but a specific experiment on a specific piece of cloth--an apparently pure application of the scientific method that the West has taken for granted since the days of the Enlightenment.
To be sure, not even the most avid defender of radiocarbon dating would deny that at least one mystery continues to surround the shroud: How did the image of a man, plainly crucified and preternaturally finely rendered, get on it in the first place? Were the image not allegedly Christ's, the matter would be relegated to obscure academic journals on Byzantine textile technology. As things stand, however, the conundrum of origin and the slim chance that the scientific dating may have been rigged (not likely) or flawed (a better possibility) are being employed by die-hard shroudies to shore up their hope that their cause is not lost. Faith is ratcheting up the scrutiny on science to unheard-of levels, and the mystified scientists, who considered the case essentially closed, find themselves challenged to make it so airtight that not even a prayer can slip in.
A 14TH CENTURY SKEPTIC One of the first universally accepted documentations of what we now know as the Shroud of Turin happens to be a letter declaring it a fraud. In 1389 Pierre d'Arcis, then Bishop of Troyes, described a "twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and the front...thus impressed together with the wounds which he bore." The linen cloth had occupied a place of honor in a church in the tiny French town of Lirey since the 1350s; D'Arcis, who was writing to his Pope, complained that "although it is not publicly stated to be the true shroud of Christ, nevertheless this is given out and noised abroad in private." This annoyed D'Arcis, who wrote that a predecessor of his had ascertained that "the image is cunningly painted...a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed."