TURIN, Italy — Like a quiet river, the pilgrims flow through the cathedral by the tens of thousands each day. They stop for exactly two minutes to contemplate the faint traces of a bearded man's face, limbs and folded hands on a yellowing sheet hung in the nave.
They stand in silence, some in tears, then exit on cue. No wailing, no pushing. This is not Lourdes or Fatima, where the sick pray for miracle cures. This is the Shroud of Turin, now on display for the first time in two decades and beheld by many Roman Catholics as a miracle in itself. Even Italy's ubiquitous mobile phones are obediently switched off in its presence.
As orderly as all this seems, the pilgrimage is an act of rebellion.
Ten years after carbon-14 dating tests led scientists to place its origin between 1262 and 1390, many of those flocking here still assert that the shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. His image, they believe, was fused onto it by a divine burst of energy when he rose from the dead.
"My faith is not based on mathematical proof but on the grace of God, who leaves us free to decide," Giulio Caiusi, a 35-year-old Italian banker, said outside the cathedral. "What I see on the shroud is the blood of a man who died on a cross. The wounds coincide in a striking way with the gospel's account of the crucifixion."
Whether a medieval fake or a "snapshot of the Resurrection," as one scholar calls it, the shroud has become one of the most studied artifacts in history and a symbol of the duel between science and religious faith.
A Million Visitors
More than a million people, including Pope John Paul II, have come to see the linen cloth since April 18, when it was removed from its silver casket, unrolled and displayed horizontally in a bulletproof glass case for viewing until June 14. With 800,000 more already having reserved a viewing time, Turin's Catholic archdiocese expects the total to approach the record 3 million who came in 1978, before science cast the most serious doubt on the cloth's origin.
The shroud's reappearance has coincided with--and fueled--a backlash against the carbon-14 findings. The revisionists are pressing their views in cyberspace and in a spate of new books that debate every detail and theory of the cloth's history.
