The Shroud
September 28,1978 – Northern Italy
Barely more than misplaced starlight, the lights of Milan peeked dimly through the window as the jet flew over northern Italy. Decker studied the outline of this landlocked constellation as he considered the consequences of the job ahead. Like Professor Goodman, Decker was certain the team's research would prove that the Shroud was nothing more than a cheap medieval forgery. The problem was, he knew there were a lot of people who would not appreciate having their bubble of faith burst by the truth, including Elizabeth's mother, a devout Catholic. So far his relationship with her had been pretty good. How would she take all of this? I guess we'll be spending Christmas with my mom for the next few years, he mused.
Father Rinaldi, who had gone directly from the meeting in Connecticut to Turin, had chartered a bus to take the team the 125 kilometers from Milan to Turin. By the time the bus pulled into their hotel it was midnight and though it was only 7:00 p.m. in New York and 4:00 p.m. on America's west coast, everyone decided to go to their rooms to try to get some sleep.
The next morning Decker, who was never very good at adjusting to different time zones, got up before the sun. Because of the time difference going east, he should have wanted to sleep in. But it made no difference – he was ready to get up and logic was not involved. As the morning sky grew light, he looked out from his hotel window down Turin's long, straight streets which intersected at nearly perfect ninety degree angles. On either side of the streets were homes and small stores occupying one and two story buildings, none of which appeared to be less than two centuries old. Beyond the city, to the north, east, and west, the Alps pierced the atmosphere and clouds on their way to the sky. Elizabeth would love this, he thought.
Decker left the hotel for some early morning sightseeing. Despite the city's proximity to the mountains he encountered very few hills on his walk. About a quarter of a mile from the hotel he came to the Porta Palatina, an immense gateway through which in 218 B.C. Hannibal, after a siege of only three days, drove his soldiers and elephants into the Roman town of Augusta Taurinorum, or ancient Turin. As he walked, the wonderful smells of morning began to drift from the open windows of houses along his path. The sounds of children playing followed, and then suddenly the timeless atmosphere of the city was crowded into the present by the sound of a television in someone's kitchen. It was time to head back to the hotel.
As he entered the hotel lobby, Decker heard the voices of team members. The breakfast meeting had already begun and the conversation centered around a problem with the equipment that the team had brought from the United States. Without interrupting, Decker tried to piece together what was going on. Apparently the equipment had been put in the name of Father Rinaldi with the intention of avoiding exactly the sort of problems with customs that the team was now experiencing. Unfortunately, though Rinaldi was an Italian citizen, he had been in the U.S. too long and back in Turin too short a time to be eligible to bring the equipment into the country without a sixty-day impoundment. Rinaldi and Tom D'Muhala had already been sent to the customs office in Milan for some face-to-face diplomacy and arm twisting.
After breakfast, several members of the team decided to walk the half mile from the hotel to the royal palace of the House of Savoy, which for centuries had been the residence of the kings of Italy. It was in a suite of rooms in the palace that the team would be conducting its investigation of the Shroud. When they reached the palace they were stunned to find tens of thousands of people standing several abreast in lines that stretched for over a mile to the east and west. The lines converged at the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista, which is adjacent to the palace. In the cathedral, in a sterling silver case sealed within a larger case of bullet proof glass filled with inert gasses, the Shroud is kept. Two or three times a century the Shroud is taken out and put on public display, drawing pilgrims from all over the world. The crowd that day represented only a small fraction of the three million people who over the past several weeks had traveled from all over the world to see what they believed to be the burial cloth of Christ.
The team was escorted through a courtyard into a restricted part of the palace. At every corner were guards armed with small European-made machine guns. The team paused as they entered, awestruck with the size and splendor of their surroundings. There was gold everywhere: on chandeliers, on picture frames, on vases, inlaid into carvings in the doors and other woodwork. Even the wallpaper was gold-gilt. And everywhere were paintings and marble statuary. At the end of a long, opulently decorated hall was the entrance to the princes' suite, where the team would conduct their experiments. Beyond the ten-foot doors was a fifty by fifty foot ballroom, the first of seven rooms which made up the suite. The second room, which is where the Shroud would be placed for examination, was as magnificent as the first. Crystal chandeliers hung from ceilings painted in classical frescos of angels and swans and biblical scenes. Somewhere in the life of ancient buildings which remain in use comes a point at which time and progress can no longer be ignored. Whether it is the carriage house that becomes a garage or a closet that is converted to a phone room, some aesthetics ultimately yield to the demands of modern convenience. In the princes' suite the evidence of compromise was a bathroom and electricity. The bathroom was a strange arrangement with two toilets and five sinks. This would double as the team's photographic darkroom. The only electricity was provided by a wire just slightly thicker than a standard extension cord, which led to a single outlet about an inch away from the baseboard. The team's equipment would require far more power than that.
"We'll need to run electric cables up here from the basement," said Rudy Dichtl, the team member with the most 'hands-on' electrical experience. "I'm going to see if I can find a hardware store."
Decker told Dichtl that he had noticed a hardware store while walking that morning. He wasn't entirely sure of the location, but thought he could find it again. "Great," said Dichtl. "If they have what we need, I could use an extra pair of hands lugging it back."
For the next two days there was little to do but sightsee. Despite Father Rinaldi's best efforts, customs in Milan simply refused to release the team's equipment. Decker took advantage of the time to get to know some of the other team members. His intent was both to be friendly and to gather background information for the series of articles he planned to write. Everyone spoke freely of their thoughts about the Shroud and how each had become involved in the expedition. Decker was confident that he'd be able to sell the story to the wire services. An exclusive like this could really boost his career.
All of this, of course, assumed that the team got their equipment. Finally, Decker decided they'd waited long enough. If Milan didn't release the equipment soon, this expedition really was going to end up as a wild goose chase. Wednesday morning, when Father Rinaldi came into the hotel lobby to report on his progress, Decker was waiting for him. "Any luck, Father?" Decker asked.
"None," responded the priest.
"Well," Decker said, "I think I know how we can break this logjam."
"Please, go on," Rinaldi encouraged.
"Now, this might not be the way you like to do things, but right now Turin is crawling with reporters covering the Shroud exhibit. If you held a press conference and announced that we can't do our research because a bunch of petty bureaucrats won't let us have our equipment, you could cause quite a bit of embarrassment for our friends in customs."
By now Eric Jumper and John Jackson had come into the hotel lobby where Decker and Father Rinaldi were talking. "Anyway," Decker said, "if you embarrass these guys a little I bet they'll come through with the equipment."
After talking it over, Rinaldi, Jackson, and Jumper saw the merit in Decker's idea but modified it to be somewhat less confrontational. Rinaldi called the Minister of Commerce in Rome and pointedly explained that if the problem was not resolved and the equipment delivered immediately, the American scientists would not be able to begin their work. If that happened, Rinaldi continued, he felt it likely that the international press would be quite interested and would probably hold the Minister of Commerce personally responsible for preventing the scientific testing of the Shroud of Turin. Rinaldi was put on hold for about five minutes; obviously the threat had some effect. When he returned to the phone the minister agreed to have the equipment shipped to Turin.
When the truck carrying the equipment finally arrived at the palace it was Friday afternoon – five days behind schedule. There were no forklifts available to unload the truck so the team's own brute strength was required to bring the eighty crates packed with some eight tons of equipment up the two long flights of stairs to the princes' suite. As soon as everyone caught their breath, they went to work opening crates and unpacking equipment. Soon the public viewing of the Shroud would end and it would be brought to the test room for examination late Sunday evening. There were seven days of preparation to be done in just over two. For the next 56 hours the team worked nonstop.
Some of the tests required bright light while others required total darkness. The first part would be easy but the latter required sealing off the eight by ten foot windows with thick sheets of black plastic. Maze-like light baffles made of more black plastic also had to be built for the doorways. The testing table was set up in the Shroud room and the adjoining rooms were established as staging areas for testing and calibrating equipment. The bathroom, the only source of water, was converted into a darkroom for developing X-rays and other photography. Equipment that malfunctioned had to be repaired on-site with replacement parts the team had brought from the U.S. or by adapting locally available equipment. Quite a few square pegs would be forced into round holes over the next several days.
Finally, on Sunday night at about midnight, someone in the hall said, "Here it comes."
Monsignor Cottino, the representative of Turin's Archbishop-Cardinal, entered the Shroud testing room, followed by twelve men carrying a sheet of three-quarter inch plywood, four feet wide and sixteen feet long. Draped over the plywood was a piece of expensive red silk which covered and protected the Shroud. The men were accompanied by seven Poor Claire nuns, the senior of which began to slowly pull back the silk as the men lowered the plywood sheet to waist level. The testing table, which could be rotated ninety degrees to the right or left, sat parallel to the ground, awaiting the transfer of the Shroud.
Silence fell over the room as the silk was carefully pulled back, revealing a sheet of off-white herringbone linen. Decker waited for a moment for this second protective covering to be removed, then slowly it dawned on him that it was not a covering at all. It was the Shroud itself. He squinted and stared at the cloth, barely able to make out anything resembling an image of a crucified man. One of the unusual features of the Shroud is that when it is seen up close, the image seems to blend into the background. The same is true when you move several yards back. The optimum range for viewing the image is about six feet, and Decker was much closer than that. He had also expected the image to resemble the photos of the Shroud. But most of the Shroud photos are actually negative images which, because the Shroud is itself a type of photographic negative, result in a much clearer image than can be seen with the naked eye.
Suddenly Decker felt drained. The anticlimax of seeing the Shroud, added to the weight of sleepless hours, rushed over him like the chill of cold water. The extent of his disappointment surprised him. Even though he believed the Shroud to be a fraud, he discovered that from a strictly emotional point of view, he really wanted to feel something – closer to God, awe, perhaps just a twinge of the strangely religious excitement he used to feel when looking at a stained glass window. Instead he had mistaken the Shroud for nothing more than a protective drapery.
He moved back from the Shroud and to his amazement, the image became much more distinct. For a moment he rocked back and forth, watching the strange phenomenon of the Shroud's appearing and disappearing image. Decker's curiosity went wild. Why, he wondered, would the artist who painted the image have painted it so that it was so hard to see? How could he have painted it at all, Decker wondered, unless he used a paintbrush six feet long so that he could see what he was painting? Few, if any, of Decker's emotional drives were ever greater than his curiosity. The lack of sleep no longer seemed to bother him – he wanted to understand this puzzle.
Decker watched as Monsignor Cottino walked around the Shroud, stopping every couple of feet to remove thumbtacks which held the Shroud to the plywood. Thumbtacks! Rusty and old, their stains rushed out in all directions to bear witness of their having been there. So much planning and effort had gone into keeping even the tiniest foreign particles away from the Shroud, only to find that the centuries, perhaps millennia, that preceded them had been far less careful.
During the 120 hours allotted to the American team, three groups of scientists worked simultaneously, one at either end of the Shroud and one in the middle. The sound of camera shutters formed a constant background as nearly every action was recorded in photographs and on audio tape. Despite the sleep they had already lost, during the next five days few on the team would sleep more than two or three hours per day. Those who were not involved in a particular project stayed near to help those who were, or simply to watch.
Thirty-six hours into the procedures, as husband and wife team members Roger and Marty Gilbert performed reflectance spectroscopy, something very unusual happened. Starting at the feet and moving up the image, they began obtaining spectra. As they moved from the foot to the ankle, suddenly the spectra changed dramatically.
"How can the same image give different spectra?" Eric Jumper asked the Gilberts. No one had an answer, so they continued. As they moved the equipment up the legs, the reading remained constant. Everything was the same except the image of the feet, and more specifically, the heels.
Jumper left the Shroud room and found team member Sam Pellicori, who was trying to sleep on a cot in another room. "Sam! Wake up!" he said. "I need you and your macroscope in the Shroud room right away!"
Pellicori and Jumper positioned the macroscope over the Shroud and lowered it until it was just above the heel. Pellicori focused, changed lenses, focused again, and looked, without saying a word, at the heel image on the Shroud. After a long pause, he said dryly, "It's dirt."
"Dirt?" asked Jumper. "Letmelook." Jumper looked through the macroscope and refocused. "It is dirt," he said. "But why?"
Decker watched as Professor Goodman, too, examined the heel and reached the same conclusion.
As the next shift of scientists came on everyone met for a review and brainstorming session to determine the direction and priorities for the next set of tests. "Okay," Juniper started. "Here's what we know. The body images are straw yellow, not sepia, as all previous accounts indicated. The color is only on the crowns of the microfibers of the threads and does not vary significantly anywhere on the Shroud in either shade or depth. Where one fiber crosses another the underlying fiber is unaffected by the color.
"The yellow microfibers show no sign of capillarity or blotting, which indicates that no liquid was used to create the image, which rules out paint. Further there is no adherence, meniscus effect, or matting between the threads, also ruling out any type of liquid paint. In the areas of the apparent blood stains, the fibers are clearly matted and there are signs of capillarity, as would be the case with blood."
"What about the feet?" asked one of the scientists. For those who had just come on duty, Jumper explained what had happened with the reflectance spectroscopy test.
"Of course there's dirt," one of the female team members said after Jumper's explanation. "What could be more natural than dirt on the bottom of the feet?"
"Yes," said Jumper, "but that assumes that this is indeed an authentic image of a crucified man, somehow transferred to the cloth." Personally, Jumper did not discount the possibility, but he knew that it was bad science to start from an assumption.
Still, the obvious became harder and harder to deny, for not only was there dirt on the heel, but the amount of dirt was so minute that it was not visible to the naked eye. Why, they wondered, if the Shroud was a forgery, would the forger go to the trouble to put on the image dirt which no one could see? No one had an answer.
As the meeting broke up, Goodman, who continued to be the greatest skeptic, remarked, "Well, if it is a forgery, it's a damned good one." Decker was struck by the tremendous allowance that Goodman had made in that little word 'if.'
It had now been three and a half days since Decker had slept. Finally he resolved to return to the hotel. Before retiring, though, he sat in the lobby with team members Roger Harris, Susan Chon, and Joshua Rosen, unwinding with a slowly stirred cup of coffee heavily laced with Irish cream liqueur. Decker entertained little thought of interviewing anyone. Over the past three days, he had begun to see himself much less as a reporter and much more as a member of the team. Habitually, though, he continued making mental notes.
One of his companions, Dr. Joshua Rosen, was a nuclear physicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on laser and particle beam research for the Pentagon. Rosen was one of the four Jewish members of the team and Decker could not resist the opportunity to ask him about his feelings on examining a Christian relic.
Rosen smiled. "If I weren't so tired I'd lead you on a bit," he said. "But if you really want an answer on that you'll have to ask one of the other Jewish members of the team."
"You don't have an opinion?" Decker queried.
"I have an opinion, but I'm not qualified to answer your question." Rosen paused and Decker's brow tightened in puzzlement.
"I'm Messianic," Rosen added in response. Decker didn't catch his meaning. "A Christian Jew," Rosen explained.
"Oh," said Decker. "This isn't something that happened in the last few days, is it?"
Rosen laughed.
Roger Harris, too tired to even talk, barely managed to force down a mouthful of coffee as he began to laugh with Rosen. Decker's remark had not been that funny, but the pained look on Roger's face set Susan Chon to laughing and soon the four overtired, punch-drunk team members were laughing uncontrollably, with each member's inability to control himself fueling the others' laughter.
On the other side of the dining room, a woman had been sitting since before Decker and the others came in. On the table before her were the remnants of a long-finished cup of tea and a half-eaten hard roll. She held a red hotel napkin, pulling it in one direction and then the other. She had been watching Decker and the other team members as they talked, building up her courage to go over to their table. Their laughter made them seem somehow more approachable and human, while its infectious nature seemed to brighten her own dark mood. She rose from her seat and walked slowly but decisively toward them.
"You are Americans?" she asked when their laughter began to pass.
"Yes," Joshua Rosen responded.
"You're with the scientists examining the Shroud?"
On the woman's face Decker saw lines of worry; in her eyes, the evidence of recently blotted tears.
'Yes," he answered. "We're working with the Shroud. Is there something we can we do for you?"
"My son – he's four – is very ill. The doctors say he may not live more than a few months. All that I ask is that you allow me to bring flowers to the Shroud as a gift to Jesus."
No one at the table had gotten more than twelve hours sleep in the previous four days and it seemed to Decker that the tears of laughter were joined by tears of sympathy for the woman's plight and her modest request. All agreed to help but Rosen was the first to offer a plan. It would be impossible for the woman to bring flowers to the Shroud herself. However, Rosen told her that if she would bring the flowers to the palace the next day around one o'clock, he would bring them to the Shroud himself.
In his room, Decker fell quickly to sleep and felt totally rested when he awoke fourteen hours later, at noon the next day. When he arrived at the palace an hour later, Rosen was talking with the woman from the hotel. Decker noticed that the cloud of depression which had covered her the night before had been replaced by a peaceful look of hope. She smiled in recognition at Decker as she started to leave.
Rosen started up the stairs with the vase of cut flowers but, spotting Decker, turned and waited.
"Pretty neat, huh?" Rosen said.
"Pretty neat," Decker responded. But to himself he wondered what would happen to the woman if her son died.