The sacred sheet has been making people to discuss boldly through the centuries, but it does not seem that this disturbs the crowds of faithful, who want to pray before the Man of the Shroud and go out touched and deeply moved.

More than re-tracing the history of the ecclesiastic and scientific event of the Shroud, we have chosen to offer some medallions, namely "readings" elaborated into a relation of the recent exposition. They are pieces of discussions that have been going on for centuries, because the sheet that wrapped the body of a crucified man goes on interrogating, in search of answers

"For every tot number of years, the periodic exposition of the Shroud is a kind of check-up, a thermometer put under the armpit of the Italian society to measure the temperature that the a-critical clericalism has reached.

It is not a question of faith: in reality, the Church is cautious before stating that it is the authentic Shroud of Christ. The hierarchy limits itself to offer the object to the superstitious veneration of the faithful, in order to obtain the taking. They are poor in spirit: is there anything wrong to let them believe? However, the more interesting aspect of these pre-suppositions is the attitude assumed by the world of information. The daily and weekly papers are worried and fear to offend the susceptibility of anyone, for which they keep the position of subcontractors, remaining apparently equidistant ".¹

Here is a perfect synthesis of a "political" reading of the Shroud. The periodic exposition would be nothing but a form of despotic clericalism, a further symptom –if needed- of an Italy where the Church matters too much. The mention of vile money is not missing, the taking, just as if these manifestations were finalised to fatten the safe of the curiae, an extra income for correct balances. There is also a prickling on the side of popular religiosity, assimilated at superstition, at archaic rite of the "poor in spirit" who believe in naively and infantile way. The journalist finds it very strange and incomprehensible that the information does not intervene with a heavy hand, with judgements without any appeal against the historical- scientific plausibility of the sacred Cloth. Prudence, or better shrewdness would act so as a beat given first to the circle and then to the barrel, a way, like any other, of not recognising the evidence, that is, to say that everything is a put-up job.

Nowadays the printing press is used to print debates at two voices, also on religious thematic, "against" and "in favour of". The two opinions are drawn near to create such a grinding effect as to attract the attention. This makes everybody think to be pushed, at least for a while, towards the territory of the other ^2.. The pairing of pieces on the same theme, the Shroud, by the Atheist Piergiorgio Odifreddi, and Monsignor Giuseppe Ghiberti, is of this kind. Odifreddi starts mentioning one after the other all the common places that doubt, or deny altogether every authenticity 3 of the Shroud in Turin. The mathematician from Turin highlights that there are at least 43 shrouds, and that when in history one shroud was destroyed, soon –as Calvin ironically said- a facsimile replaced it. Pope Clement VII, allowing the exposition of the sacred Cloth in 1390, to stop every fraud, ordered, "to say loudly that the given representation was not the true Shroud of our Lord Jesus Christ, but a picture or table made as an imitation of the Shroud". The proof of the radiocarbon, effectuated in 1988, was decisive. It proved that the Shroud had been made between 1260 and 1390. Therefore, "the miraculous fact did not exist" and they had to declare the case as closed.

The believer, in this case Monsignor Ghiberti, appears less dogmatic than the atheist partner, "The poverty of certitude is the strength of the Shroud –he says- and this makes it dearer to me". Whatever the case is, it remains a strong sign. "Whatever we may think about the date of its origin and modality of formation of its image", it is a sign. The admirable link of the sacred Cloth with the passion of Jesus Christ arouses spontaneously an affectionate interest for this object, which is full of mystery and connected to a rooted devotion of people.

That sheet, undoubtedly, has wrapped a man that had been crucified, and the thought of so much pain cannot but shake and interrogate us.

The people in Turin say that the Shroud does not make miracles and, if they say this, there is not reason why we should doubt of it. 4 Someone could ask oneself, why is this peculiarity typical of the most venerated icon in Christianity?

Apparently there is no answer, because generally relics and Sanctuaries are bound to the miracle, if not to miracolism, at double wire. We dare to give an answer, which we call a theological answer in a wider sense, since it comes from the Biblical observation that, in the Gospel, texts too near to the cross are characterised by the disappearance of miracle. This way of proceeding is typical of the Gospel by Mark, which experts define as the Gospel of the disciple, whose reading teaches the true following of the Master. Along this track, going along it up to the end, one can say that the cross is the anti-miracle par excellence. Jesus dies on the cross and lets the drama be consumed up to the end. If he had accepted the challenge of coming down from the wood, to which he had been nailed, he would have betrayed -just with a miracle- the mission which the Father had entrusted to him, and would have given a different image of God’s face: power without love. On the contrary, the Biblical constant procedure is different: it is the revelation of God in weakness. ⁵

From that moment, in which not even the Son of God wanted to avoid the cross, this became the great symbol, which every man can look at and mirror himself. The cross is a meeting-place because it is, eventually, for everyone an incomprehensible, dark transit place.

The apologetics of scientific character stands out more than a religious apologetics. Here is an instance. "Probabilistic studies, performed by various authors independently, have proved that the man of the Shroud is Jesus of Nazareth, with practically a 100% level of certainty. 6 The author, Giulio Fanti, associated professor of mechanic and thermal Measures in the department of mechanic engineering in the University of Padova, reaches a peremptory statement after a close analysis of the Sacred Cloth of more than 600 pages, with hundred pieces of work on the argument. We do not deny the acribia and the seriousness of the realized investigations, but we see the risk of turning the Shroud into a kind of "scientific Gospel". It follows that today’s man should bow his head before this and should also try "to pull the sprint" to the resurrection starting from the Shroud, bringing into action a procedure that wrongly mixes elements of faith with scientific hypothesis’^. According to Bruno Barberis, director of the international Centre of Syndonology, we must avoid the opposite extremisms that see in the Shroud, on one hand a false middle age painting, no less than a painting by Leonardo , and on the other hand the sure proof of the Resurrection. According to Barberis, we should set aside the crusades to be against or to favour the authenticity of the Shroud. Consequently, he who goes near the Sacred Cloth for scientific research has to know that the religious or materialist pre-comprehensions must not pre-condition him. ⁸ The fundamentalism, both atheist and believer, is always lurking.

The writer Antonio Scurati, in a thoughtful intervention on La Stampa,⁹ criticises the attitude of the aggressive atheists and states that "the question of the Shroud reveals that the Christian religiosity is very well present in the western mentality also after the secularisation, (...). To accept, above all for us laypersons, neo-pagans and misbelievers, that it is an icon like many others, is truly the most eluding hypothesis. We already have icons to burn.

We forge more icons in any market day than in a synod of bishops. The true idolaters are not the Catholics who adore the Cloth as a sacred print. it is we that are idolaters as icon men media, lovers of vain idols; we who do no longer seek the true image (of Christ or of any other thing), because we have eliminated every difference between image and reality, between idols and icons, between truth and illusion. We are children of too many minor "gods"; we submit to images that are pure self-simulacrum. For us an image is not an event because every event is only an image. We indifferently pass from a napkin to an earthquake. We are the charmed, cheated little grannies, who go on knitting for phantasms, leaving behind the undeciphered sense of everything. We let it go round empty, finishing by losing, at the end, even the distinction between life and death. We are the adorers of images that, as we know, are made out of inert matter: of tabernacles, which we know that they are empty ". What can we say? Putting aside the improper use of the Verb "to adore", which, comprehensible by one who is not of the circle (we venerate "icons" and adore God alone), what impresses us is the worry for the lost vision of the contemporary man who can see only simulacra, functions, illusions. The eyes overcrowded with images have lost the capacity of seeing, of distinguishing, above all, the capacity of reaching what is real, the other, whatever is dense and true. In this sense, all of us are poorer. We have called the reflections of Acurati as a lay reading for the simple motive that laity is –for us- the meeting space in which, deposing one’s own judgement and activating the attention of the experience of the interlocutor, we let ourselves be questioned by his/her position.

"The fact that we can discuss the authenticity of the Shroud in Turin –independently from the result of the discussion- underlines in a concrete and evident way, that Jesus has really existed, also because of the possibility that the Sacred Shroud has really wrapped his tormented, killed and risen body. The specificity of the Christian tradition is brought to evidence unequivocally also like this. this makes difficult the homologation of Christianity with the other religions".¹⁰

According to Lucetta Scaraffia, lecturer of Contemporary History in the University of Studies, Rome, "la Sapienza", the strong reference to the corporeity of Jesus and, therefore, to the mystery of Incarnation, is one of the fundamental messages of the Shroud for the contemporary man. We know that the Incarnation is one of the two hinges of Christianity, together with that of redemption: this also represented by the Sacred Cloth, at least for those who believe. In a secularised and analphabetic society at religious level, Jesus risks to be seen as a mythical and a-historical figure, like a Greek, Roman or Oriental divinity. God in the flesh with doubtless historical reference to Jesus, is the inalterable specific reality of the Christian religion, which makes it really different from all other religions.

Second, from the reality of Incarnation, which the Shroud strongly refers to, a particular confirmation comes that human nature is to the image of God, chosen by God as space of manifestation. Enormous consequences derive from this; let us just think of the bioethics controversy questions.

To see the sign of the passion imprinted on the Shroud, even in the latest public exposition, hundred thousands of persons stood in line patiently waiting with trepidation for one’s own turn. Now, who are the people of the Shroud? ¹¹ They certainly are the throng of those who live moving throughout the sanctuaries of the Peninsula, an intense "popular devotion", which means also to be in search of concrete and tangible signs of faith. These people wish to see and to touch, to experience. They want to give more concrete traits of God’s face, which church people have often make rarefied and diaphanous. A face that, anyhow, is not easily reachable. Let us make it clear that it is not the matter of a second hand religiosity preceded by the minus, but rather an intense, beautiful, total way of living our faith. Near more devout faithful there is the huge troop of visitors, more modern believers, but also non-believers or people in search of faith. For many of them the Shroud is not connectable directly with the search of Jesus, though it is a rare and singular part of it; or the trace of a deep suffering that reminds us of the human finiteness that often arms us blindly and brutalises life. Thus, the sacred Sheet becomes a mirror on which we can project and try to give sense to the mystery of one’s own suffering. Finally, there are the tourists and the curious persons who want to be able to say, within some year, "I, too, was there". The reminder of the media, the particularity of the event and the "crowd effect" are all dragging ingredients. This does not mean that they are ill-disposed people; rather it often happens that the meeting with the man of sorrows is a beneficial shock, which moves and makes us think. "All of us, in different ways –Marina Corradi writes- perhaps even those who say that they are curious or are from far off, have come to search something, dragged by a current, by a tension whose less imprecise name could be the nostalgia that lives deep in us. It is the nostalgia of a God, who has founded and filled our western cities with their splendid Cathedrals. We may have forgotten these things as adorers of anything else. We are unconscious returning pagans, so that the phrase of Paul to the Areopagus fits also for us: for many today’s men God is the "unknown God" of the Athenians. Research or anxiety for another life presses the doors of the Cathedral in Turin. ".¹²

On Sunday, May 2, after being in prayer before the Sacred Cloth, Benedict XVI spoke of the Shroud in the perspective of Holy Saturday. He said that the Shroud is its icon.¹³ He, then, referred to the article of the Creed that says: Jesus Christ "was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried, descended into hell, and the third day he rose from the dead". "Dear brothers and sisters –he went on- in our time, especially after going through the past century, humanity has become particularly sensitive to the mystery of Holy Saturday. The hiding of God is part of contemporary man’s spirituality in an existential way, almost unaware, like a vacuum in the heart, which has gone dilating more and more. By the end of the ‘800, Nietzsche wrote, "God is dead! And we have killed him". This famous expression, seen closer, is taken almost literally by the Christian tradition and often we repeat it in the Way of the Cross-, perhaps without being fully aware of what we say. After the two world wars, the lager and the gulag, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our epoch has become ever more a Holy Saturday: the darkness of this day questions all those who seek the sense of life, in a particular way it questions us believers. We, too, have to deal with this darkness ". The Shroud that they immersed in the darkness of a tomb and wrapped the body of a crucified man is a mystery of darkness for those who come to venerate it, but also of light, as a pre-figuration of the resurrection.

"In the extreme hour of solitude, we shall never be alone", the Pontiff states, just as history cannot remain petrified in the wait, even if filled with the most radical sharing (God not only dies, but also remain in death), of the Holy Saturday. The Pope makes himself understood and puts each of us –single, collectiveness- and history before a silent and eloquent sign of a love message written in blood.

One thing is certain: The passion of a man tortured ferociously and crucified in the form transmitted by the Gospels, up to the wound of the side, is imprinted on the Shroud. The first part of narration from the four Gospels does not arouse particular problems of concordance with the Shroud, though the way the image is visible on the linen cloth remains a mystery. The talk changes when we consider the modality of the burial. "For the synoptic we would say that it is known or interests only a wrapping in a sindón, but Luke (24,12, the empty tomb) at least at editing level, knows also the presence of othónia, in the plural, the clothes which John speaks of. John, in his turn, mentions only the othónia in the nominative burial, but during the visit to the empty tomb he speaks also of the soudárion". As we can see, the question is rather complex, but in good substance, it is possible to state that there is the trace of a double tradition in the Gospels: Mark and Matthew on one side, John on the other side and a meeting point with Luke. With regard to the burial, the conclusion cannot but be modest. Two traditions, not in contrast –this must be said clearly- present the moment of the burial of Jesus in a little different way and one of these -the narration of John- is interested to a more symbolic reading of facts. On the other hand, to fix our mind on the sheet, just the one found in the empty tomb, does not correspond to the "beyond" towards which they orient the Gospels themselves. 15 The angels proclaim the same words to the first visitors of the tomb on Easter morning as to the spectator of the funeral sheet that wrapped the body of Jesus, "Why to you look among the dead for him who is alive? He is not here, He is risen" (Luke 24,5-6).

Ugo Sartorio ofmconv
Director of Il Messaggero of Sant’Antonio
Via Orto Botanico, 11 – 35123 Padova