The sad truth is that responsibility for the flawed carbon
dating rests as much as JPII shoulders as anyone. It was his personal decision
to dramatically reduce the flawed protocols which called for more samples from
other areas of the Shroud (still limiting
the amount taken to acceptable level).
He also yielded to
pressure from the radio carbon labs who claimed that further testing by the
Shroud of Turin Research Project ( STURP) would be more intrusive than the
radio carbon tests. In addition, as the result of previous lobbying by the
carbon labs, STURP was excluded from the process of selecting the site(s) from
which the samples were selected. The
results were that the samples site was selected without any reference to the
STURP research would have demonstrated that the sample area was anomalous – it
contained material of different composition from the rest of Shroud.
In fact the Oxford lab which was late in its report had
received a report from a sub-contractor that there was ancient cotton in the sample
that appeared to be part of a reweave or
had been interwoven when the linen.
There was a reason for JP II to short circuit everything
that is understandable: the shroud
wasn't the only thing on his plate. At the time he was planning and executing a ground breaking trip to Latin America where
he cut Church ties to two dictatorships - Pinochet in Chile and Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti .
His faith in the authenticity of the Shroud led him, I
believe, to make scientifically invalid judgment on the protocols.
But make no mistake about it, it was his determination. The
final decisions were transmitted to the Archbishop of Turin in May 1987 in a
secret letter of which the radio carbon labs were informed by their sources in
the Vatican .
As a matter of fact, the prime opponent of STURP (Rochester ’s Harry Gove), who was elated at the exclusion
of STURP from the process, complained to the head of the British Museum
He was right about that but not to later crow that the results
had proven the Shroud to be a fake. Although the Archbishop of Turin initially
stated that the Church accepted the results he later recanted, and JPII
referred to the Shroud in words that affirmed his belief inauthenticity..
JPII can not escape
responsibility for the protocols though. Better that it not have been done
than that it was done by a scientifically shoddy process.
John C. Klotz
