The Shroud of Turin
Both visible and hidden

Inspiring but enigmatic, a piece of linen is lifting the fortunes of Italy's auto capital

Religion and public policy

THIS Italian city at the foot of the Alps is famous for two things. One is making cars, and the other is hosting one of the world's most famous sacred objects: a four-metre long linen cloth which many people revere as the burial shroud in which the crucified body of Jesus was wrapped.

Employment in the car industry is long past its peak, but fascination with the Holy Shroud seems to grow and grow. A 67-day public viewing of the cloth, the first for five years, is currently in progress. Between now and June 24th, it is expected to attract up to 3m visitors to the city. Nearly 5,000 volunteers, mostly rather dignified middle-aged men and women, are helping to guide people to the Cathedral of Saint John and keep them safe; a security operation, comparable in scale to a medium-sized airport, has been mounted in the city centre. Mayor Piero Fassino, a veteran politician of the centre-left who began life as a communist, and local businesses, have worked energetically to show the city in the best possible light.

When Erasmus visited on a recent week-day afternoon, the atmosphere was pleasant and a system for booking places in the queue online was working well. Most visitors were French or Italian, and their motives seemed to be a mixture of cultural curiosity and discreet devotion. Compared with the reactions which a holy object can generate in the eastern half of the Christian world, the mood was low-key; there was no sign of people weeping, fainting, or falling to their knees. If visitors were moved, they kept their emotions to themselves. But the excitement will grow ahead of a visit by Pope Francis on June 21st.

And at the heart of all this activity is a great mystery. The last few popes have spoken of the shroud with awe and encouraged people to contemplate it, but the Vatican has in recent years avoided any pronouncement on whether the cloth really is the one that covered Jesus. In 1988, carbon-dating tests were carried out in laboratories in three countries, and concluded that the fabric had been constructed in the 13th or 14th century; it was a medieval fake. But believers in the shroud's authenticity point to countervailing evidence: traces of pollen from plants found only in the east Mediterranean, for example. It has been argued that extraneous matter, or radioactivity, could have skewed the carbon-dating results.

To the naked eye, images of the front and back of a slim, dignified man are only dimly visible. But in certain ways, the picture on the Shroud has become more accessible over the past century or so, as it has been subjected to different forms of photographic analysis, and the three-dimensional qualities of the image have been studied. The image does correspond with the Biblical account of a man who was lashed all over his body with a particular kind of whip, commonly used in Roman times, and crowned with thorns which caused heavy bleeding. It also looks clear that the victim was hung up to die after nails were driven through his wrists, not his palms as most religious art would have it. If this was a forgery, it was an ingenious and anatomically intelligent one.

Pope John Paul II, visiting the shroud in 1998, described it as a "mute yet surprisingly eloquent witness" of the death and resurrection of Jesus. His successor Benedict XVI called it a symbol of the resurrection, but also of the "hiding of God" and of Easter Saturday, the time between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection when Christ is said to have descended into hell and freed its inmates from the bondage of death. An unusual pilgrim this year was the head of one of Italy's main Muslim bodies, the League of Imams and Mosque Preachers: Mohamed Bahreddine said he appreciated his visit as a "voyage in time and history in which we saw the face of Jesus [as it appears] in the vision of our Christian brothers." (Islam agrees with Christianity about the Virgin birth, ascension to heaven and future second coming of Jesus, but it says he only appeared to die on the Cross.)

Doubtless Pope Francis will have some arresting and unexpected things to say when he arrives next month. Perhaps they will reflect his earlier life in a country, Argentina, where physical torture was widely practised. The meaning of an object of veneration is always, to some extent, in the eye of the venerator.

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