Analysis: Pope asked to protect Shroud

GURAT, France, April 22 (UPI) -- Only days after the Western Church joyfully commemorated Christ's resurrection, the most important Easter relic has once again become the center of a heated debate.

Within the next two weeks, Pope John Paul II will receive a petition from 52 international scientists urging him, in effect, to protect the Turin Shroud against potentially damaging restoration work. The Shroud bearing the features of a crucified man may well be the cloth that enveloped the body of Christ, many Christians, scientists included, believe.

The scholars will request the appointment of "an international commission of respected scientists and other knowledgeable persons to advise on all matters relevant to the Shroud's conservation, scientific testing and long-term preservation as an object of study," William Meacham of the University of Hong Kong told United Press International in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Meacham, a Tennessee-born archaeologist and a Methodist, is a spokesman for this initiative.

Two significant points lie behind this extraordinary move:

(1) There is in the scientific community a growing sense that the Shroud's 1988 radiocarbon dating might have had substantial flaws. Scientists then concluded that the cloth was only some 800 years old and therefore did not hail from Jesus' time. But Meacham and many others insist that it was wrong to take only one tiny sample from just one part of the Shroud. If in another round of testing, two or three fresh samples are taken from different sections of the cloth, Meacham suggested, examiners might well arrive at different conclusions.

(2) Restoration work done by two Italians and two Germans on the Shroud in 2000 under the auspices of archbishop -- now Cardinal -- Severino Poletto of Turin have "irretrievably damaged" the cloth," Meacham claimed.

Last fall, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, a Swiss-based textile restorer from Hamburg, denied in a UPI interview that she had damaged the relic. She explained she had separated it from the Dutch linen to which nuns in Chambéry in Savoy had sewn it after a fire in 1534.

This, she said, allowed her to examine the back of the Shroud -- making her the first researcher ever to do so. While it bore bloodstains, there were no mysterious marks comparable to those on the front of the cloth.

These marks show an amazingly detailed picture of a bearded man who had been beaten about the body, crowned with thorns and pierced with nails through the wrists and the feet.

On the side of the body's outline there appeared to be an image of a wound, which was perhaps the one caused by a Roman soldier's spear when he tried to find out if the crucified Jesus was alive or dead (John 19:34).

Like Flury-Lemberg, Meacham believes that the "Shroud could very well be authentic; the preponderance of evidence leans that way," as he told UPI.

"When I saw the Shroud, it struck me as something quite unlike anything I have ever seen." He described the faint and vague image on the cloth as something "that simply could not be a painting or a rubbing."

But Meacham faulted Flury-Lemberg for "treating the Shroud like some kind of a table cloth to be cleaned up. What she did was a horror. She is an aggressive restorer as opposed to a conservator."

Meacham faulted her for her "Teutonic sense of neatness. She even ironed the cloth and used a ultrasonic vaporizer and hung weights on its ends to get rid of some creases."

These creases, Meacham went on, are old fold-marks "perhaps going back to Byzantine times. Thus some evidence may have been destroyed." According to Shroud researchers Eamnuela and Maurizio Marinelli, "the loss of the folds, which could testify to the way the Shroud was kept in more ancient times, is feared."

Flury-Lemberg, a Lutheran, explained that the Dutch linen's progressing oxidization had been endangering the Shroud. As she separated the two textiles, she removed "spoonfuls of soot." Indeed, she said, she cleaned the Shroud before it was sewn to a new cloth.

But archaeologist and Shroud researcher Paul Maloney thundered, "I was horrified to learn that after removal of the burned fabric the borders of the burn holes were treated to the tweezer/scraping technique. If this subtle evidence is altered or erased through our own ignorance, then we have destroyed something extremely important and a part of the whole that ought to be considered for conservation."

While Meacham is adamant that "a lot has been lost and the damage is important," he nevertheless allowed, "not all is lost. Fortunately, the image (of the crucified man) and the blood are still there."

On that positive note, it's hard to argue with Meacham that an international commission appointed by the pope might indeed be a useful means to protect the cloth with its image from being, as Meacham termed it, "monkeyed with."