Toto

Not exactly - the Catholic Church does not vouch for the authenticity.

There's something else going on.

Solo

I think the point to take home is that the Church knew six hundred years ago the shroud was a fake, and instead of throwing the rag out they have kept it as a relic for future use. But as Chesterton said, the Catholic church is superior to any other Christian confession as it admits every sort of faith, even a respectable one.

Jiri

Antipope Innocent II

Er, no. What actually happened is that the Church found it was a fake six hundred years ago and its local representative - the Bishop of Poitiers - ordered the local noble family who owned it to stop claiming it was the genuine article. The Bishop couldn't "throw the rag out" because the Bishop didn't own it - the De Charny family did. The De Charny's obeyed until Bishop Henri was safely dead and then, the next time they were short of cash, they started displaying it as the real Shroud again.

Bishop Herni's successor ordered them to stop and when they ignored him, petitioned the Pope, citing his predecessor's evidence that the rag was a fake. The Pope couldn't argue with the evidence and, even though he was a relative by marriage to the De Charny's, also ordered them to stop claiming it was the real thing.

Then the Shroud disappears from the records for a while, but seems to have been included in one of the De Charny women's dowries when she married into an Italian family, which is how it eventually came to Turin. By then all records of any proof it was a fake and the statement to that effect by the Pope (Antipope actually, but anyway) was no longer known, so it starts getting displayed as the real thing again.

The documents showing that it had been proven a fake didn't come to light again until modern times, and they are one reason why the modern Church has always been rather cautious about making any explicit claims about the Shroud.

Interestingly, those who have been most keen on claiming the "Shroud" is genuine lately are largely non-Catholics, including some distinctly "fundie" Protestants.

Huon

The RCC makes a difference : it is not a relic, it is an icon. And they are not iconoclasts !

An icon is an image. There are no relics of Tarzan, but there are many icons of him.

In France, there are not many supporters of the authenticity of the Turin Shroud.

Joan of Bark

And does anyone else think that the image on the shroud appears too much like a medieval artistic impression of JC? It doesn't appear to be the image of a Jew.

Antipope Innocent II

Yep. The eyes are too close to the top of the head, for example. This makes sense if the image was made by a Fourteenth Century artist, as it fits with late Medieval aesthetics and the Gothic artistic style, but if it's the image of a human then he was a seriously deformed mutant. Ditto for the length of one of his arms, which seems to have been done to cover the images penis. The De Charnys didn't want devout pilgrims contemplating the divine willy before depositing their silver in the family coffers.

IIRC the weave of the linen and even the length of the cloth fits the idea that it was woven in northern Europe in the late Medieval period perfectly, but doesn't fit with First Century middle eastern linen at all.

It's interesting that all of the supposedly "scientific" examinations of the "Shroud" over the years have included batteries of complex scanning equipment, electron microscopes and all kinds of other high-tech gear wielded by scientists with degrees in a variety of remarkable fields of specialty. But none of them have ever included people who would be useful if you actually wanted to work out if it was a Medieval fake or not - like experts in Gothic art or specialists in Medieval textiles.

The Skeptical Shroud of Turin website hasn't been updated for quite a while, but it's still a good antidote to the pseudo scientific craziness which still surrounds this dramatic piece of Medieval art.

PS I said Henri was Bishop of Poitiers in my earlier post. This was wrong - he was from Poitiers but was Bishop of Troyes.

Solo

Even if the church did not own the shroud, it could have ordered it destroyed as blashpemous. At some point the shroud came into its possession (I mean Vatican.) Why would it not have been destroyed then ?

BTW, you are probably familiar with another, and more grievous, example of the church regression into error and disrepute. The Canon Episcopi of the beginning of the 10th century declares the belief in the reality of witchcraft to be the mark of an infidel. Compare that with Summis desiderantes affectibus.

Jiri

Antipope Innocent II

It wasn't "blasphemous". And your idea that the Bishop of Troyes could simply "order" a powerful family like the De Charnys to do anything with their private possessions owes more to a Hollywood view of the Church in the Middle Ages than to reality. Contrary to popular belief, the Medieval Church was not a theocracy.

The De Charnys reluctantly stopped exhibiting their "Shroud" as the real thing when ordered to by Bishop Henri because it was a bit hard to argue with his evidence that the thing was a fake - he'd found the artist who'd made it after all. But when it was easier to deny it was a fake, once Bishop Henri was dead, they blithely ignored his successor and only had to stop exhibiting it a second time when their relative the Pope stepped in.

It was a private possession of the House of Savoy until 1983, when it was donated to the Papacy.

Because while it isn't officially recognised as a genuine relic, it's still recognised as a famous depiction of Jesus. At the very least it's a priceless work of Medieval art. Why the hell would they "destroy it"?

"Error and disrepute"? Thinking about magic and witchcraft changed over that 500 years. Check out Richard Kieckhefer's Magic in the Middle Ages (or via: amazon.co.uk) for the details as to how and why this happened.

Solo

By definition, a burial shroud is a relic:

Jiri

Solo

Perhaps, my point is difficult to grasp.

Ditto.

Jiri