Turin Shroud to go on public display
Pastor Dale Morgan
Turin Shroud to go on public display
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By Malcolm Moore in Rome
Last Updated: 5:43PM BST 30/05/2008
The Turin Shroud is to go on public display for the first time in a
decade, sources at the Vatican have indicated, coinciding with a new set
of tests on its age.
The linen has only been put on display five times in the last century
The Vatican keeps the 14ft by 4ft piece of linen, believed by some to be
the death shroud of Jesus, in an aluminium case built by an Italian
aerospace company to shut out all light, air and humidity.
The case is filled with Argon gas in order to prevent bacteria from
eating the material.
However, the success of the exhibition of Padre Pio’s remains in Puglia
has convinced the Vatican to bring forward the next public showing of
the shroud from 2025 to the year after next.
The linen has only been put on display five times in the last century
and the last time it was exhibited, in 2000, over half a million
visitors arrived in Turin in two months.
The exhibition will coincide with a new set of scientific tests on the
Shroud in order to verify its age. Professor Christopher Ramsey, the
head of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator unit, first dated
the Shroud to between 1260 and 1390 in tests conducted 20 years ago.
However, he has agreed to refresh his analysis after academics suggested
that the presence of carbon monoxide in the material could have given a
misleading result.
Believers think the Shroud miraculously shows the face and body of Jesus
after crucifixion. Tests by John Jackson, a professor at the University
of Colorado proved the image on the Shroud had not been painted, dyed or
stained.
An project to photograph the Shroud has also been recently completed. A
12.8 billion pixel image of the linen was made after the Vatican asked
for a detailed reproduction to be made for scholars to scrutinise.
Mauro Gavinelli, who supervised the project, said 1,600 photographs had
been stitched together, and said the result was like “looking at the
Shroud through a microscope”.