Superhero Fr. Dwight Longenecker Believes in the Shroud of Turin
From I Wannabe a Superhero on the blog of Fr. Dwight Longenecker (here, looking like Zorro), pastor at Our Lady of the Rosary, a Roman Catholic Parish in Greenville, South Carolina:
There’s more. I believe in the rest of the stuff too. The incorrupt bodies of saints and apparitions of the Queen of Heaven to peasant children. I believe in the stigmata and the miracles in the Bible and the Book of Revelation and the Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem and the Shroud of Turin and levitating saints. I believe in answers to prayer and if you push me I will even confound you by believing that a big fish really did swallow Jonah and spit him up angry and smelling of vomit and that Elijah was fed by ravens and Moses split wide the Red Sea and that God does miracles today.
Now you might say that this is nothing really very special, and that this is, after all, what all Catholics should fully and totally believe, and that it is certainly what a Catholic priest should believe, but when it hit me in the middle of saying Mass it also hit me how bizarre and unusual this way of looking at the world really is.
Do read, I Wannabe a Superhero.
I have mentioned the very interesting Fr. Longenecker in this blog. After graduating from the fundamentalist Bob Jones University he went on to study theology at Oxford University. He was ordained as an Anglican priest and served as a parish curate, a chaplain in Cambridge and a country parson.
Realizing that he and the Anglican Church were on divergent paths, in 1995 he and his family were received into the Catholic Church. He spent ten years working as a freelance Catholic writer, contributing to over twenty-five magazines, papers and journals in Britain, Ireland and the USA.
In 2006 he was ordained as a Catholic priest under the special pastoral provision for married former Anglican clergy. He is pictured here with his wife and four children and an unidentified bishop.
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
That’s the trouble with all these other churches. They’re upsetting all their traditionalists, fundamentalists and biblical literalists with their excursions into extravagant liberalism and reductionism. So what’s happening? They’re all ending up in my church as if we didn’t have way too much ultra-conservatism already. We’re being held back here! Hey buddy! You wanna try out the the really right-wing ultra-Catholic Latin Mass Catholics; you could find a home there! Oh, I forgot. They don’t think there’s a real Pope anymore. Welcome home, anyway! Yeah! There’s a few like me in the fold too, all kinds of fish!