This is an automatic Google Chrome translation of an article from Vatican Radio for April 12, 2011:
The Shroud in the speeches of three great Popes: This is the theme of the conference held yesterday Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome as part of the course in Shroud studies. Rapporteur of the meeting was Monsignor Giuseppe Ghiberti, theologian and biblical scholar and one of the leading international experts of the relic.
The Popes and the Holy Shroud. Essential in a relationship whose devotion and science often intersect each other. An argument for free faith, but on which many popes have always felt the need to take a stand, showing a modest sort of love, which is important in a unique way to the relic. Father Giuseppe Ghiberti, theologian and biblical scholar.
The Shroud can not be dismissed as an article of faith, because I believe in is not, for example. In reality, however, helps us to believe, and all the Church’s program is in that direction: to call to faith, those who can be distracted and, perhaps, in contact with this sign may resume a relationship with the Lord.
During the public exhibition of the Holy Shroud, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, stressed in their speeches the natural link with the story of the relic of the Gospels and the last days of Christ’s death. The Shroud as "mirror of the Gospel," and as a model and then call to evangelization. But if Paul VI for the Shroud is the modern man of private fortune to see some feature of the face of Jesus "so true, so deep, so human and divine," for John Paul II, the relic is an opportunity to define the boundaries between science and faith:
For John Paul II, there is the insistence on the one hand, to clarify what the scope of the jurisdiction of science, namely the answer to those two famous questions of the age of the Shroud and the mode of formation of ‘ Shroud image. On the other hand, is there any reference to suffering in silence than the weak, so that both aspects, that of devotion on the one hand and research on the other, is conditional on each other.
The prospect of Benedict XVI on the Shroud as an aid rather than to accept suffering and death. Even Father Ghiberti:
For Benedict XVI, is the call to the mystery of Holy Saturday, that is to echo when you put in front of the Shroud, and that is the mystery of the Incarnation when he touched the lowest point of his creation: no only death, but remain in death, so the power of the Resurrection has caused the overrun and at the same time, gave reason for hope. And we pass the same road.