POPE BENEDICT TO VIEW TURIN SHROUD MAY 2
POPE BENEDICT TO VIEW TURIN SHROUD MAY 2
(ANSA) - Vatican City, October 27 - Pope Benedict XVI will visit Turin next May 2 to view the Shroud of Turin which will be on display next spring for the first time since 2000, the city's archbishop, Cardinal Severino Poletto, confirmed in a statement on Tuesday.
The Turin Shroud is venerated by Catholics as the winding cloth used to wrap the body of the crucified Christ.
It bears the faint image of the front and back of a tall, long-haired, bearded man and appears to be stained by blood from wounds in his feet, wrists and side.
Benedict gave his personal approval to displaying the Shroud in 2010, 15 years ahead of its previously scheduled viewing for the Catholic Church's 2025 Jubilee.
Next year will be the first time the Shroud has been put on display since its controversial restoration in 2002
''Many believers from all over the world had expressed their desire to see the Shroud before 2025. So we asked the Holy Father and he gave his blessing and said he, too, would come to see it,'' said Msgr. Giuseppe Ghiberti, chairman of the committee responsible displaying the relic.
Whether the Shroud's haunting image is holy or counterfeit remains one of the great mysteries of all time. Experts have never been able to explain how the image was made.
Carbon-dating tests were conducted on the cloth in 1988 by scientists in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona, who were each given separate linen samples to work with.
The tests dated the Shroud to between 1260 and 1390, suggesting that it was a brilliant mediaeval fake.
Other scientists have since claimed that contamination over the ages, for example from water damage and fire, were not taken sufficiently into account and could have distorted the results.
In 1999 yet another group of experts put a 7th century date on it, following careful comparisons of an almost identical shroud in Valencia.
In the same year two Israeli scientists said plant pollen found on the Shroud supported the view that it comes from the Holy Land.
Given the controversy and the fact that dating techniques have improved significantly since the 1988 tests were done, there have been numerous calls for further testing.
In 2005, a study, published in the international scientific journal Thermonautica Acta, claimed that the shroud is between 1300 and 3000 years old and dismisses carbon dating tests carried out 1988 years ago.
The author of the study, Dr Raymond Rogers, said the 1988 tests had used bits of cloth which were not part of the original shroud, but taken from patches added much later to repair fire damage.
He based his claim on his studies of the samples used for the carbon dating and comparisons with other samples taken from the main sheet of cloth. He said the different ages of the two cloths could be proved by the relative levels of a chemical called vanillin which they contained.
Dr Rogers is a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and is considered one of the world's leading experts on the world-famous relic.
Earlier this month a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, Luigi Garlaschelli, announced that he had made a life-sized reproduction of the Turin Shroud using only medieval technologies.
However, leading Shroud scholars have contested both his claims and results.
The Shroud is thought to have travelled widely before it was brought to France in the 14th century by a crusader.
French Clarisse nuns kept it for many years in one of their convents, where it was damaged by fire in 1532.
The nuns sought to put this damage right two years later by sewing about 30 patches onto it.
The Shroud was given to the Turin archbishop in 1578 by the Duke of Savoy and has been kept in the Cathedral ever since.
Until recently it was stored rolled up in a silver casket.
But at an international symposium in Turin in 2000 - the last time the shroud was put on display - experts decided to store it flat in a transparent case filled with the inert gas argon.
The shroud has only been put on display five times in 100 years.
