Recent Developments
updated January 2011
Pope Benedict XVI Appoints New Shroud Custodian
Oct 12, 2010
The following article, titled "Benedict XVI appoints new custodian of the Holy Shroud of Turin"
Courtesy of the Catholic News Agency:
Vatican City, Oct 12, 2010 / 09:54 pm (CNA/EWTN News) - Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Vicenza as the new Archbishop of Turin. The appointment makes Archbishop Nosiglia the new custodian of the Shroud of Turin. He will succeed Cardinal Severino Poletto, who submitted his resignation upon reaching the retirement age of 75.
The new Archbishop of Turin was born on October 5, 1944 in Rossiglione, Italy in the Diocese of Acqui. He was ordained a priest on June 29,1968 and was named Auxiliary Bishop of Rome on July 6, 1991. He was ordained a bishop on December 14 of the same year.
On October 6, 2003 he was transferred to the Diocese of Vicenza. Among the posts he has held are president of the National Council of Catholic Schools, president of the International Organization of Catholic Education, delegate of the Council of European Bishops of Europe for Catechesis and Campus Ministry.
Currently the vice president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, a post he has held since May of this year.
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April 6, 2009
Connection to Knights Templar
The Shroud was in the news again!
Due to recently, rather dramatic announcement from the Vatican that new evidence has come to light showing the Shroud was hidden and secretly venerated by the medieval Knights Templar for more than 100 years after the Fourth Crusade.
“Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades," the Vatican said, in an announcement recently.
This information appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.
On April 6, 2009, the London newspaper The Times reported that official Vatican researchers had uncovered evidence that the Shroud had been kept and venerated by the Templars since the 1204 sack of Constantinople. According to the account of one neophyte member of the order, veneration of the Shroud appeared to be part of the initiation ritual. The article also implies that this ceremony may be the source of the 'worship of a bearded figure' that the Templars were accused of at their fourteenth century trial and suppression.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6040521.ece
On April 10, 2009, the Telegraph reported that original Shroud investigator, Ray Rogers, acknowledged the radio carbon dating performed in 1988 was flawed. The sample used for dating may have been taken from a section damaged by fire and repaired in the 16th century, which would not provide an estimate for the original material. Shortly before his death, Rogers said:
"The worst possible sample for carbon dating was taken." "It consisted of different materials than were used in the shroud itself, so the age we produced was inaccurate," - "...I am coming to the conclusion that it has a very good chance of being the piece of cloth that was used to bury the historic Jesus."
A recent study by French scientist Thierry Castex has revealed that on the shroud are traces of words in Aramaic spelled with Hebrew letters. Barbara Frale, a Church scholar, told Vatican Radio on July 26, 2009, that her own studies suggest the letters on the shroud were written more than 1,800 years ago.
Her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.
This cloth with image was well know of by both the Greek and Church of Rome.
Dr Frale said, that among other alleged offenses such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud image which was believed to be Jesus himself after the crucifixion.
Dr. Frale believes they (the Knights Templars) had rescued it to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed that Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected. (I personally feel they also rescued it from the Roman Catholic Church, that was in the process of eliminating all competition in the salvation business. The Greeks and Cathars both fell under attack in the same year under the same pope, 1204.)
Dr. Frale said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by the British historian Ian Wilson in 1978. (Most of which I still adhere to with subtle difference.)
In 2003 Dr Frale, the Vatican’s medieval specialist, unearthed the record of the trial of the Templars, also known as the “Chinon Parchment," after realizing that it had been wrongly catalogued. The parchment showed that Pope Clement V ( 1305-1314) the pope that over saw the dissolution of the Templars, had accepted the Templars were guilty of “grave sins," (under serve pressure from the King of France, Philip the Fair) such as corruption and sexual immorality, but not of heresy. This last point is important. Even though the Templar saw Jesus as a man, due to the image on the Shroud, yet still divine. This was and is in contrast to the current view of Jesus as a divine being son of the God himself.
Dr. Frale said that their initiation ceremony involved spitting on the Cross, but this was to brace them for having to do so if captured by Muslim forces during the Crusades.
Last year Dr. Frale published for the first time the prayer the Knights Templar composed when “unjustly imprisoned," in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies” to abandon calumnies and lies and revert to truth and charity. (A Christian quality lost with the creation of the Office of Inquisition.)
During the sack of Constantinople, theory has it, that certain high level Knights Templars took the Shroud and next it is seen at Lirey in France in 1353, when it was displayed in a local church by descendants of Geoffroy de Charney, a Templar Knight burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay.
Additional
The self proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar have asked the Vatican to “restore the reputation” of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some £80 million were confiscated.
The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, based in Spain, said that when the order was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties, farms and commercial ventures belonging to knights were seized by the Church. A British branch also claiming descent from the Knights Templar and based in Hertfordshire has called for a papal apology for the persecution of the order.
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APRIL 10, 2009
New evidence on Shroud emerges
Pope confirms visit to Shroud of Turin
POPE-SHROUD Jul-27-2009
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0903394.htm
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI confirmed his intention to visit the Shroud of Turin when it goes on public display in Turin's cathedral April 10-May 23, 2010.
Cardinal Severino Poletto of Turin, papal custodian of the Shroud of Turin, visited the pope July 26 in Les Combes, Italy, where the pope was spending part of his vacation. The Alpine village is about 85 miles from Turin.
The cardinal gave the pope the latest news concerning preparations for next year's public exposition of the shroud and the pope "confirmed his intention to go to Turin for the occasion," said the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, in a written statement July 27.
The specific date of the papal visit has yet to be determined, the priest added.
The last time the Shroud of Turin was displayed to the public was in 2000 for the jubilee year. The shroud is removed from a specially designed protective case only for very special spiritual occasions, and its removal for study or display to the public must be approved by the pope.
The shroud underwent major cleaning and restoration in 2002.
According to tradition, the 14-foot-by-4-foot linen cloth is the burial shroud of Jesus. The shroud has a full-length photonegative image of a man, front and back, bearing signs of wounds that correspond to the Gospel accounts of the torture Jesus endured in his passion and death.
The church has never officially ruled on the shroud's authenticity, saying judgments about its age and origin belonged to scientific investigation. Scientists have debated its authenticity for decades, and studies have led to conflicting results.
A recent study by French scientist Thierry Castex has revealed that on the shroud are traces of words in Aramaic spelled with Hebrew letters.
A Vatican researcher, Barbara Frale, told Vatican Radio July 26 that her own studies suggest the letters on the shroud were written more than 1,800 years ago.
She said that in 1978 a Latin professor in Milan noticed Aramaic writing on the shroud and in 1989 scholars discovered Hebrew characters that probably were portions of the phrase "The king of the Jews."
Castex's recent discovery of the word "found" with another word next to it, which still has to be deciphered, "together may mean 'because found' or 'we found,'" she said.
What is interesting, she said, is that it recalls a passage in the Gospel of St. Luke, "We found this man misleading our people," which was what several Jewish leaders told Pontius Pilate when they asked him to condemn Jesus.
She said it would not be unusual for something to be written on a burial cloth in order to indicate the identity of the deceased.
Frale, who is a researcher at the Vatican Secret Archives, has written a new book on the shroud and the Knights Templar, the medieval crusading order which, she says, may have held secret custody of the Shroud of Turin during the 13th and 14th centuries.
She told Vatican Radio that she has studied the writings on the shroud in an effort to find out if the Knights had written them.
"When I analyzed these writings, I saw that they had nothing to do with the Templars because they were written at least 1,000 years before the Order of the Temple was founded" in the 12th century, she said.
END
Related is the DVD called “The Fabric of Time” a Grizzly Adams Production circa 2007 Holographic nature of Shroud and Letters and word found on Shroud.
This support fully my research and contention written about in “The Silent Gospel - History of the Shroud” the movie screenplay completed and registered in May 2009.
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| Shroud of Turin October 06, 2009 |
| An Italian professor of organic chemistry, Luigi Garlaschelli, says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin using materials and techniques available in the Middle Ages. This proves that the relic some believe is Christ's burial cloth is actually a medieval fake, he contends. In the photo, Garlaschelli's recreation (r) is pictured next to the original (l). More at | Reuters.
AUG 15, 2008 - LOS ALAMOS FINDINGS
Using some of the most advanced analytical equipment available, a team of nine scientists at the famed Los Alamos National Laboratory confirmed that the material used for radiocarbon dating of the shroud in 1988 was not part of the shroud’s fabric. Previously, micro-chemical tests had demonstrated that the cloth is at least twice as old as the medieval date determined by the now discredited carbon 14 tests. This gives new life to historical and forensic arguments that the shroud might indeed be the burial cloth of Jesus.
PRESS RELEASE
COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15 — In his presentation today at The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed startling new findings proving that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of Turin, which categorized the cloth as a medieval fake, could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they examined from directly adjacent to the C-14 sampling area were “definitely not linen” and, instead, matched cotton. Villarreal pointed out that “the [1988] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.” Villarreal also revealed that, during testing, one of the threads came apart in the middle forming two separate pieces. A surface resin, that may have been holding the two pieces together, fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly, the two ends of the thread had different chemical compositions, lending credence to the theory that the threads were spliced together during a repair.
LANL’s work confirms the research published in Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005) by the late Raymond Rogers, a chemist who had studied actual C-14 samples and concluded the sample was not part of the original cloth possibly due to the area having been repaired. This hypothesis was presented by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino in Orvieto, Italy in 2000. Benford and Marino proposed that a 16th Century patch of cotton/linen material was skillfully spliced into the 1st Century original Shroud cloth in the region ultimately used for dating. The intermixed threads combined to give the dates found by the labs ranging between 1260 and 1390 AD. Benford and Marino contend that this expert repair was necessary to disguise an unauthorized relic taken from the corner of the cloth. A paper presented today at the conference by Benford and Marino, and to be published in the July/August issue of the international journal Chemistry Today, provided additional corroborating evidence for the repair theory.
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