The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth about 4.4 metres long and 1.1 metres wide, bearing the faint front-and-back image of a naked man. Millions believe it shows the body of Christ. The documented evidence is less simple.
The Horror
The cloth first appears in the 1350s at the church at Lirey in France, founded by the knight Geoffroi de Charny, where it was exhibited. A pilgrim badge from Lirey depicting it is dated to between 1355 and 1410. The sources vary on exact dates. Around 1389 or 1390 Bishop Pierre d’Arcis of Troyes wrote to the antipope Clement VII calling it a forgery, saying a previous bishop had identified the painter. Clement allowed it to be shown only as a representation and not as the true shroud of Christ.
In 1898 Secondo Pia photographed it, on 28 May, and the negative showed the image more clearly than the cloth itself. That discovery made the Shroud a modern puzzle.
In 1988 laboratories at Oxford, Arizona and ETH Zurich radiocarbon-dated a sample to AD 1260-1390 at 95% confidence. Most experts accept the result. Some defenders have argued the sample was a medieval repair or contaminated, and later statistical reanalyses have questioned the consistency of the lab data. How the image was made remains unexplained.
What is claimed
Pollen, dust and anatomical arguments are cited on both sides. Claims in popular retellings that investigators found pollen from the Jerusalem region, or that the wounds are anatomically exact and show nailing through the wrists, are unconfirmed here.
The Modern Relic
The Shroud was damaged by a fire on 4 December 1532, when molten silver from the reliquary burned holes through the folded cloth. Poor Clare nuns patched it in 1534. In 1578 it was moved to Turin, where it has remained.
On 11 April 1997 a fire struck Turin Cathedral. The Shroud was in a glass case, described as bulletproof and 39 mm thick. The firefighter Mario Trematore broke it with a sledgehammer, with another fireman helping, and the cloth was carried out unscathed. The cause of the fire is possibly arson.
The Church neither endorses nor rejects the Shroud’s authenticity, and John Paul II said it has no specific competence on the question. It is shown on rare exhibitions, including 2010, 2013 and 2015.
