A Spiritual Weapon for Our Time

My faith was shaken when the Shroud of Turin was "debunked" as a mediaeval forgery. Not in the Shroud but in the "science" used to "debunk" it.

From Crisis

By Luke O'Hara

The Shroud of Turin has survived over the centuries to provide us with a weapon to defeat the lies of the Evil One in our day.

Last week on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Mel Gibson defended the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, bringing the Shroud into the public eye once again. He’s not the only one defending Christ’s burial cloth.

Dr. John Campbell, a prominent YouTube commentator on medical topics—especially on malpractice inherent in the Covid vaccination regime—recently changed course to present a compelling analysis of the evidence for Christ embedded in the Shroud of Turin. The Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection are all documented in that linen cloth whose fabric embeds countless forensic clues detailing Christ’s Passion and whose ghostly image contains a wealth of 3D data encoded long before the birth of computer imaging.  

An Italian lawyer and amateur photographer named Secondo Pia was the first to photograph the Shroud. King Umberto I, who owned the holy relic, had granted permission to display it in Turin Cathedral’s 1898 Arte Sacra exhibition, and Pia was commissioned to photograph it. 

Working during the lunch break, when the doors were closed to the public, Pia brought a portable generator into the cathedral, set up two electric bulbs, and—after an earlier, unsuccessful session—finally managed to get the right lighting on his second try, on May 28, 1898. Around midnight, Pia developed his photo, and, as he wrote some years later,

Closed in my darkroom, completely intent on my work, I felt a very profound emotion when, during the development, I saw appearing on the plate, first the Holy Face, with such clarity that I was astonished and at the same time happy, since from that moment I could have the certainty that my work would have a good outcome. 

His camera had unveiled a detailed portrait of the Savior—the very face of Jesus plain to see on that glass plate—hidden in the Shroud since the moment of His Resurrection. Not a vague, ghostly image that required a medieval leap of faith to see the truth therein but a startling proof waiting two millennia to be revealed. Proof fit for a skeptical age, fit to close out a century that had followed hot on the French Revolution and had given birth to Marx and Engels. The ethereal stain on that linen had finally come alive as a striking portrait of the God-man once wrapped within it. 

The face of God Incarnate, stark and real, His eyes closed in death. A spiritual weapon suddenly unveiled at the start of an apocalyptic age that would see the First World War; the Rape of Nanking; a Second World War stamped dead by two atomic infernos; the genocidal reigns of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot; and now, here in the erstwhile Land of the Free, the mutilative “gender reassignment” of innocent children and the rampant slaughter of millions more in their mothers’ wombs in the name of “reproductive rights.” 

Meanwhile, as Western European countries find themselves swamped with invaders bent on demolishing the Christian civilizations they were built upon, here in America swarms of drones and seeming UFOs infest the skies in what looks like a futuristic PSYOP war—or even the start of Armageddon. How direly we need that spiritual weapon today.   

In 1976, scientists at Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico put a 1931 photo of the Shroud into a VP-8 Image Analyzer. The VP-8 is an analog device originally intended for enhancing differences of grayscale in images such as x-rays and aerial photos of terrain, thus rendering their evaluation easier. 

“When applied to normal photographs,” Shroud researcher Barrie Schwortz writes, “the result was a distorted and inaccurate image. However, when it was applied to the Shroud, the result was an accurate, topographic image showing the correct, natural relief characteristics of a human form.”    

Indeed, the result was astonishing, even miraculous: out of the data encoded in the faint image scored onto the linen of the Shroud by what is thought to have been a hyper-short burst of intense radiation 2,000 years ago, a striking 3D portrait emerges—a sculpture of the Crucified One.

That phantom that had been venerated for nearly two millennia had been biding its time all along, hiding a mysterious code printed onto non-photosensitive linen by a process still not quite understood nor reproducible today in this age of Space X and hypersonic flight and man-made digital minds that can research and write polished dissertations on any subject in the flash of an eye.

Peter M. Schumacher, expert in operation of the VP-8, writes: 

Consider the following: The Shroud of Turin induces a result through photographic imaging that is unique, compared to all other photographic results taken from other objects of the same acknowledged period as the Shroud, of prior periods, and to the present day. It is the “data” existing on the Shroud of Turin, which induces the unique photographic results. Therefore, the Shroud image, itself, is unlike any other object or image known to exist. 

Clearly, the Shroud is a time capsule left in Jesus’ tomb by Almighty God and preserved through countless travels and vicissitudes to land in our laps in this present age of darkness, an age gravely crippled by Satan’s lies, yet one wherein science can verify the historical reality of Jesus by peeking into that time capsule. The Shroud documents the details of His Passion and Death as recorded in Scripture, thus verifying that record as well as His own historicity, and it even allows us to see his face—indeed, the whole of Him in all His superhuman suffering.  
On the Shroud, we see the marks of His scourging, of His crowning with thorns, of the nails in His wrists and feet, of the large, oval wound of a Roman spear thrust into His heart to verify His Death. Definitively human blood testifies to His Passion, blood still red after 2,000 years because His extraordinary trauma made it rich in bilirubin. Two Roman soldiers raking at his skin from opposite directions with their metal-tipped flails left clear forensic evidence for us, in this distant millennium, to gaze upon in horror—countless “tearing wounds produced by the scourging,” as Dr. Campbell attests. 

Bruises on Jesus’ shoulders testify to the weight of the Cross, as do His “knee injuries from repeated falls,” evidence supporting the tradition that He fell three times on His climb to Golgotha. Indeed, mineralogical studies of the Shroud show that Our Lord hit His knees and nose in the dirt. Jerusalem dirt, the science says.

“Whoever this man on the Shroud is—it’s definitely a human being on the Shroud, it’s anatomically perfect—his suffering is beyond imagining,” Dr. Campbell remarks. “To my limited understanding of trauma it is all disturbingly, disturbingly accurate. I see no pathological, medical inconsistency whatsoever.”  

Disturbing indeed when one sees the wounds all over Christ’s body standing out starkly on a hyper-realistic sculpture of Jesus in rigor mortis reconstructed from data in the Shroud, a labor of painstaking love by Spanish art expert Álvaro Blanco and a team of artists under his direction. 

The image of that sculpture, highlighted in Dr. Campbell’s thorough overview of the Shroud, now vivifies this writer’s Rosary meditations on the Sorrowful Mysteries. The unfathomable reality of Christ’s sufferings is finally brought to life in a world surfeited with sensory overkill. While we thus-benumbed moderns stumble along as if on autopilot, the real flesh-and-blood Suffering Christ demands our attention: one cannot turn away one’s eyes. 

Again, as Dr. Campbell reports, it is all disturbingly accurate. In the Shroud and, even more so, in the images and reconstructions that 21st-century science empowers us to derive from its data, we are indeed looking at God’s own depiction of Christ. “All this information is genuinely there,” Dr. Campbell reminds us—information hidden for 2,000 years in a code written by God into the merest phantom of a portrait on the burial cloth of His beaten, scourged, and crucified Son. 

“I do feel that—the way the world is going at the moment,” Dr. Campbell concludes, “because a lot of things aren’t looking very hopeful at the moment…it’s almost like that this is a message for later times.”  

Indeed: a message two millennia old sealed by Almighty God, a sword of truth to slash the devil’s lies.

Pictured: Secondo Pia's 1898 negative of the image on the Shroud of Turin, which has since been used as part of the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. Image from Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne.