Holy Shroud, a documentary raises the opposition to the tests C14 VIDEO

 

"The Night of the Shroud" (La Notte della Sindone)

“It’s the greatest scientific cheat of all times”. So Franco Faia, the man who with Luigi Gonella and Giovanni Riggi di Numana was one of the workers, and witness of the operation of the dating of the Holy Shroud, describes what happened then. Faia gives his opinion in “La notte della Sindone”, a documentary movie by Francesca Saracino, produced by Paolo Monaci Freguglia for Polifemo, a co-production with Rai, distributed in Italy by Medusa Home Entertainment.

The movie offers a very accurate reconstruction, with documents and witnesses both new, of a real patchwork of secrets, manoeuvres and mysteries: the controversial exam with the C14, a thriller not yet clear at this moment, with many questions unanswered.

Vatican Insider has had in preview the entire DVD, and specially the “special contents”, never revealed up to now, of the puzzle. It seems particularly interesting a fresh document, which sheds a clear light on the C14 question, and on the statement according to which the Holy Shroud would be a medieval object.

Let’s remind briefly the story. The laboratories (Tucson, Zurich and Oxford) received some tiny fragments of the Holy Shroud to date using the C14. The result of the exams, made in a continuous and persistent violation of the fixed procedures, (a circumstance which cast a dark shadow on the seriousness of the coordinating agency, the British Museum) said: from 1290 to 1360. But the “raw data”, the basic numbers used to prepare the report were never made known.

Francesca Saracino e Paolo Monaci happen to own a copy of the raw data of the Arizona laboratory, and of the partial raw data of the other two laboratories. Turin Archdiocese in the past asked repeatedly the raw data, to be able to verify the correctness of the procedures, without success.

The authors of the movie submitted their data to several University scholars, both in Statistic and Chemistry. Between them the prof. Pierluigi Conti, from the Stae-owned roman university “la Sapienza”.

Conti says that in the Nature magazine report, coherent with the raw data he examined, “there is an arithmetic mistake”. We leave apart any comment on the possibility and the existence of an arithmetic mistake in a report written by scientists, with the supervision of the British Museum and published by Nature. But maybe it’s not just a mistake. “It’s a very simple mistake, and I was not the first to notice it. A little arithmetic mistake, but a crucial one; because leads to think that the material examined by the three laoboratories is homogeneous”.

When you correct this mistake, says Conti, “you arrive the contrary conclusion: that means that the age of the Holy Shroud fragments dated by Arizona laboratory is different – 50, 60, 70 years – from the fragments of the other two laboratories”. Conti says categorically: “This invalidates completely the statistic results in the article published by Nature”. Prof. Riani, from Parma State university, using different calculation systems from Conti, arrived to the same conclusion.

This is very important, because if you find in such a tiny fragment (few centimetres of tissue) such a strong not-homogeneity, when you come to consider the whole Holy Shroud – four meters of linen – “we might have variations of hundreds and even thousands of years”. Prof. Conti gives his verdict, that form a strictly scientific point of observation “there is not enough evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the Holy Shroud is medieval exhibit”.

If this is true, why the laboratories, the British Museum and other  protagonists more or less famous backed “the greatest scientific cheat of all times”? The “Notte della Sindone” offers many cues and hints, and everybody may come to his own answer; that’s why we will not give any solution. It’s important, anyway, to underline which is the scientists’ opinion, backed by the numbers.