|
Responding to Jacques Évin’s expression of support for the results obtained by the three laboratories, published by Le Monde on 16 April 1998, the Abbé de Nantes wrote to him, under the heading “We agree with you, Monsieur Jacques Évin”: «We too have confidence in your marvellous equipment, which has been perfectly mastered at Tucson, Zurich and Oxford. Indeed, having followed with eagle eyes the progress of the tested samples, we have applauded the excellent results of the three laboratories in their four datings. Each dating was of an unprecedented precision, and at Oxford the principal dating, that of the Holy Shroud, “hit the bull’s-eye! Mean date (in years BP, before present): 1964 ± 20. Calendar dates: a 68% confidence level for 11-64 AD, and a 95% confidence level for 9 BC - 78 AD”!
«It is a marvel, a prodigy: here we have the wherewithal to convert the world to Jesus Christ, crucified and, in a manner of speaking, resurrected on the terminals of the control equipment, the televisions and video recorders of the planet. You know this as well as we do. And you know that the samples in tube 1, labelled “Holy Shroud”, were transferred to tube 3, labelled “Egyptian mummy” where traces of them still remain, in a manner of speaking, in the form of formal analytical records. «As for the legend about the year 1355, which you ignorant physicists believed – although you would not believe the least statement of the Gospels – on the word of old Canon Ulysee Chevalier, a modernist in the style of a Renan or a Loisy, learn from us that it is historically untenable and that sample “number 1” failed to fit the bill because of the all too clumsy scheming of the illustrious Tite, who right from the beginning had you marching like a poodle in search of this 14th century cloth, which neither you nor he could find.1» The following month, our John Paul I pilgrimage numbered one thousand pilgrims, all making the journey to venerate the Holy Shroud in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist2. On the train, our Father made the following observation: «This 53-day long Exposition is the providential occasion for a happy encounter, in the joy of Easter and in the certitude of the Resurrection of true Catholics, new apostles, holy women and disciples of Emmaus with their Lord and Master Jesus Christ, present under the species and appearances of His Body, His Blood and His human aspect, preserved down the centuries by His holy, adoring and loving Church. «That is why all the forces of hell, although they may not have broken out into a rage, have quietly organised, mobilised and deployed themselves to obstruct this Eucharistic Crusade, this pilgrimage to view the Body of Christ, this adoration of the Shroud in which Jesus was buried, just as Christians adore the Cross which was the instrument of His suffering, but is already the throne of His elevation and glory. «This burial cloth, which the Apostle refers to under the very mysterious and Aramaic name of Soudarâ, owing to the watchful providence of our Heavenly Father remained carefully folded in a special location, whence it might attract all hearts to Him during its Exposition. This marvellous conquest is underway, revealing the thoughts and desires of each person, a sign of contradiction, the light of the nations and the glory of His People Israel, the spiritual Israel which embraces all souls of good will. «In times past the holy Soudarâ was an object of the common faith of the whole Christian people and was regarded as self-evidently authentic. Science had no part in it, so strongly did the experience, the tradition and supernatural intuition of the faithful affirm its identity. To this corresponded, on the divine level, their faith in Jesus, the risen Son of God, to Whom “nothing is impossible”. This is how we see it today, this is how the Church venerates it, and this is how He wished to remain with us, under this mode of presence, until the end of time. In this way, “when the Son of man returns, He will still find faith on earth”, that is to say in this land, in this Nation, in this Holy Place of the Church of Rome, watching, praying and adoring her Master as did Mary Magdalene, and believing in Him as did His apostles Peter and John at the sight of this incomparable Relic. «Still we must avoid the deceits of Satan, some of them irreligious and straight from hell, and others hypocritical, perfidious and seductive, with those fine appearances of devotion which are even more seductive, specious and devastating for those who allow themselves to be taken in by the Evil One. It is here that we discover our mission divinely prepared, traced out and assisted.1» These lines express, with both force and serenity, the fruit of the synthesis we have attempted in the preceding pages. They end with a recommendation which we had the opportunity to follow in October 1998 with a “DEFENCE AND ILLUSTRATION OF THE HOLY SHROUD” against the false “Apologia” of the unbelievers André Cherpillod and Serge Mouraviev2, then again in March 1999 against Jean-Michel Maldamé, a Dominican and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, who erects lying into a system3. Not to forget the stupidities of “CIELT”, which the Abbé de Nantes denounces in his open letter to Jacques Évin: «We also agree with you about the pseudo-defence of the Shroud’s authenticity by this thingummyjig which invents quite ridiculous hypotheses in order to get the alleged dates of the carbon 14 test to agree with the date fixed by Canon Chevalier and, this would be a miracle! with the date of the authentic Shroud of the years 20-30 AD.» Take, for example, the “American researcher” Leoncio Garza Valdes and the Russian “academic” Dimitri Kouznetsov. The American invents a deposit of bacteria which is supposed to have formed on the surface of the Holy Shroud a kind of bioplastic coating, increasing the level of carbon 14. As for the Russian, he imagines that the fire of 1532 could have «isotopically enriched the Shroud with carbon 14».
Fig. 31: The glass which protected the reliquary containing the Holy Shroud was reputed to be unbreakable. The mechanism for opening the compartment became stuck because of the difference in temperature with the outside. It was then that the Turin fireman, Mario Trematore, intervened. Subsequently, one of our phalangist friends met him: «My parents invited Mario Trematore and his family over to their house. He is the famous fireman who saved the Holy Shroud from the flames. He is a very straightforward man who is not very expansive about what he did. At our request, he was happy to tell of his exploits once again. He said that he was not on duty that day, but on seeing the immense smoke in the sky from his home, he had felt himself mysteriously impelled to go to the site. This man said that he did not have the faith and that he had regained it while he was carrying the reliquary of the Holy Shroud. When I asked him certain technical questions (like: how many fires were there?), he did not wish to answer, saying that the important thing is that he had regained the faith and that the Good God had arranged things in order that the Holy Shroud would not be forgotten; for this reason, He had made use of the wickedness of the wicked.» (cf. Eng CRC no 311, July-August 1998, p. 36) A despatch from the AFP agency, dated 13 April 1997, stated in fact that «according to certain sources of information, not officially confirmed, four or five fires had been detected, all localised in the chapel» (Photo AFP/Raidue). If I refer to these old debates, it is because the next Congress, which is to take place at Orvieto between 27 and 29 August on the theme SINDONE 2000, promises to commit the same act of felony regarding the carbon 14 dating as that of the Third International Congress organised by Jacques Évin in 1998: two hundred specialists (two hundred!) had come to this Congress from thirty countries to discuss recent developments of method and disputes over certain datings, but they had remained silent about the Holy Shroud. The Abbé wrote to Jacques Évin regarding this silence: «You will have to explain yourself.» Especially as the Holy Shroud had been at the centre of the first two congresses, those of Trondheim (1985) and Dubrovnik (1988). It is remarkable that, once they had committed their crime against the most interesting object of their speciality, the “researchers” should have waited ten years to organise a new congress. And they had the machiavellian cunning to entrust its organisation to that good Christian Jacques Évin! But in vain do the wicked conspire. Today, we can say that the authenticity of the Holy Shroud has been verified by the totality of the scientific disciplines, including the carbon 14 dating. From this there flow two consequences: The first is that one day it will be necessary to obtain justice not only against those responsible for the fraudulent dating of 1988, but also against the harbourers of relics. The Americans of Tucson state that they have held on to a fragment of the sample passed to them. By what right? It is for the Archbishop of Turin, the custodian of the Holy Shroud, to regain possession of this treasure. The same goes for Leoncio Garza Valdes who claims to conduct his bacterial research on a sample received from Riggi. Not to speak of this latter! The second consequence is that the “research” continues, that of those who believe, who adore, who hope and who love, the only research of any value and marvellously fruitful. To convince oneself of this, one need only read the thesis of Doctor Olivier Guillaud-Vallée, successfully defended at Poitiers on 29 May 1998, the centenary date of the photograph of 1898: THE SHROUD OF TURIN: A CRITICAL RE-READING OF THE ANATOMICAL WORKS. Displaying originality on several points that had remained obscure, «the rigorous study of the forensic expert» proceeds like an «autopsy» of the divine Victim, of whose identity there can be no doubt1. The Precious Blood of the Lord bears witness to this: «The blood images are an exact reflection of reality: they are basin shaped with a central depression, circumscribed by a clear peripheral circle left behind by the serum. Their precise contours and their flow pattern is, as we shall see later, perfectly realistic from an anatomical perspective.» The fact is that they are not simply “images”, they are genuine bloodstains: the effective presence of serum, human serum, tested on their periphery, proves this. By their arrangement on the back of the head and on the forehead, they form a royal crown for Our Lord. Sorrowful mystery of the «loss of blood together with the profound intensity of the pain suffered by the condemned», the «abominable torment» of those «interlaced thorns» plaited in the form of a «royal crown» and placed on Jesus’ head with the simple intention of mocking the royalty He had claimed before Pilate (Jn 19.2). Cruel derision and profound abjection, on which Jesus founded His kingship in obedience to His Father. Glorious mystery of that heroic obedience, proof of the divine origin of the most noble of kings. The young doctor’s observations present an astonishing convergence with those of the Poor Clares of Chambéry in their compassionate contemplation of «the bloody wounds of His sacred body, the traces of which were apparent on this Holy Shroud». Sorrowful mystery of an ignominious flagellation: «The marks of the lead pellets and the whip lashes are so frequent that scarcely a spot the size of a pinhead can be found that is exempt from the blows...»
Following Professor Zugibe of the University of Columbia, Guillaud-Vallée distanced himself from Barbet and rediscovered the very reliable “diagnostic” of the Poor Clare Sisters of Chambéry: «From the left hand, which is very clearly defined and crosses over the right hand, covering its wound, we can see that the holes made by the nails are in the middle of the hands, which are long and beautiful...» Now, experimentation and clinical observation suggest that «the nail was inserted on a level with the groove separating the two thenar and hypothenar eminences and driven in tangentially at an angle of fifteen degrees in the direction of the thumb. The nail would therefore naturally occupy the space delimited by the second metacarpal, the capitatum and the trapezoid.» The nail therefore passed from one side of the hand to the other, the hand and not the wrist. This was already the belief of Mgr Paleotto, Archbishop of Bologna, at the end of the 16th century. But it is especially through «the wound in the divine side» that the dear doctor, just like Saint Luke, makes us enter more deeply into the mystery of the Heart of Jesus. Following Dr Hynek, he raises doubts about the works of Barbet and Mérat who attributed Jesus’ death to asphyxia. «Pilate was astonished that he should have died so soon.» (Mk 15.44) And medical experts are divided over the cause of this rapid death. While we await the results of the experimental research, let us imitate the Poor Clares of Chambéry: «All the Sisters contemplated the Shroud most attentively, with a consolation that cannot be expressed, and through these beautiful marks we could see that He was veritably the most beautiful of the children of men, in perfect conformity with the prophecy of David who had made this prediction in one of his psalms. He does not look like a man desperately gasping for oxygen in order to survive. He appears perfectly calm, His bearing lofty and full of majesty. It is the image of a man who «gave up the ghost» (Jn 19.30) when he wished to do so, of his own free accord, that is to say at the hour willed by the Father, for He and His Father are but one.
BROTHER BRUNO BONNET-EYMARD Page
43 Page
44 Page
45 |
ONCE IT WAS A CENTURION,
