Online Shroud presentation ‘a blessing’ after exhibits cancelled

Two Vancouver exhibits on the Shroud of Turin have been cancelled, but the show will go on, reaching even more people than planned. 

Father Peter Mangum, director of the Museum of the Holy Shroud in Louisiana, and researcher Cheryl White will livestream a presentation about the ancient linen cloth that many believe to be the authentic burial cloth of Jesus April 4 – one day before Palm Sunday.

White was to be the key speaker at a shroud exhibit at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Vancouver this spring, but that exhibit and another at Holy Rosary Cathedral (along with many others around the world) were cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The cancellations prompted calls for a virtual event, and Carolyn Wharton of the Vancouver Shroud Association believes the April 4 online presentation could be a blessing in disguise. Although the two events that would have attracted hundreds of people in Vancouver have been cancelled, now “God will still reach thousands via this way of technology.”

The presentation will include results of recent analysis supporting original dating of the shroud as coming from the time of Christ. The new data was published in the Oxford University scientific journal Archaeometry in the past year.  

The shroud, which bears the image of a crucified man, has been kept in Turin, Italy, since 1578. Its centuries-old fibres have undergone extensive research and testing and in 1981 a team of researchers and scientists concluded that the image “is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man” and “not the product of an artist,” although science has still been unable to explain how the image got on the shroud.

The Church takes a neutral position on the shroud, but many Catholics believe the image mysteriously preserved on the ancient linen burial cloth is of Jesus. Since 2004, a presentation on the Shroud of Turin has never failed to be on display somewhere in Canada during the week before Palm Sunday, said Wharton.

Although that tradition will be broken this year, Wharton is grateful to White and Father Mangum for making their presentation public just before Holy Week. “The importance of the shroud worldwide is from a perspective of ongoing academic study, but it is also personal because it is a forensically perfect depiction of only one person in history – Jesus Christ,” she said.

The livestreamed presentation Exploring the Shroud of Turin will start online April 4 at 9 a.m. PT. Father Mangum and White will take questions after their presentation.

It will also be recorded and available for viewing afterward. For more information about the Shroud of Turin visit shroud.com.

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