THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The Vatican's official newspaper has given strong endorsement to research by Italian scientists which suggests that the Turin Shroud cannot be a medieval fake and may be the authentic burial cloth of Christ.
"For science, the shroud continues to be an 'impossible object' – impossible to falsify," L'Osservatore Romano said in a lengthy article on Thursday.
After conducting five years of advanced laser experiments, a team of experts from Enea, the National Agency for New Technologies and Energy, concluded that the imprint of a bearded man's face and crucified body could not be reproduced by modern scientific techniques.
The 14-ft-long, 3.5-ft-wide cloth was therefore not a medieval fake, the team said.
They concluded that the iconic image was created by "some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength)".
The researchers presented their results with "extreme caution" and had stopped short of putting forward theories that "strayed from science", the Vatican daily said.
But the implication of their work was that the enigmatic marks on the cloth were created at the moment of Christ's Resurrection by some sort of miracle. » | Nick Squires, Rome | Thursday, December 29, 2011
