Public to get latest peek at Shroud of Turin

TURIN, Italy — The long linen with the faded image of a bearded man is the object of centuries-old fascination and wonderment, and closely kept under wrap. Starting today, and for six weeks, both the curious and those convinced the Turin Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ can have a brief look.

By late Friday, 1.5 million people had reserved their three-to-five-minute chance to gaze at the cloth, which is kept in a bulletproof, climate-controlled case. Organizers said earlier this year they hoped some 2 million pilgrims and tourists would see the linen during the special viewing from April 10 to May 23.

That number doesn’t include Pope Benedict XVI, who will fly up to Turin, Piedmont’s capital, in northwest Italy, on May 2 for a day trip to pray before the shroud.

Traditionally, the public gets a peek at the 14-foot-long, 3 1/2-foot-wide cloth only once every 25 years. But recent decades have seen much shorter intervals. The shroud went on display in 1998 after a 20-year-wait and then in 2000 during Millennium celebrations.

Church officials resisted putting the cloth on display when tourists poured into Turin in 2006 for the Winter Olympics. But, as city officials recently put it, in a nod to the “importance to the economy and employment” of this city that is automaker Fiat’s hometown, they allowed what is being billed as the “first showing of the new millennium.”

Since the linen’s previous showing a decade earlier, restorers have removed patches sewn on by nuns in 1534, two years after a fire damaged the case then holding the it, Shroud Museum director Gian Maria Zaccone said.

Taking off the patches allowed the linen to be fully extended and let restorers smooth out creases in what for centuries had been a rolled-up cloth, making for what restorers hope will be better preservation.

“A challenge to the intelligence” is how John Paul II defined the cloth in 1998 when he journeyed to Turin to view it. In a major papal pronouncement about the shroud, the late pope asked experts to study it without preconceptions using “scientific methodology” while keeping in mind the “sensibility of the faithful.”

His balanced instruction reflected a Vatican tiptoe around the issue of just what the cloth is, calling it a powerful symbol of Christ’s suffering while making no claim on its authenticity.

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