Received a wonderful email from Maria da Glória of the Centro Português de Sindonologia that I want to share with everyone:
We’ve been in Fátima yesterday to attend “III Conferência Histórica em Fátima” in Auditorium Domus Pacis, an event organized by Fundação Oureana under the responsibility of it’s president the historian and archaeologist Dr. Carlos Evaristo, and the event was sponsored by the Portuguese Royal House and the Savoy Royal House of Italy.
We were surprised by the large number of attendants, there were spanish, french, , many italian and even american besides an unexpected number of portuguese people, I guess the event gathered more than 150 attendants.
In the atrium of auditorium people coud watch an exhibit of interesting paintings and art inspired by Shroud images, and banners including one with the Mandylion image.
After an introductory ceremony in this atrium attendantans were ushered to the Auditorium to listen to Dr Barrie Schwortz’s lecture entitled «33 years of Shroud Science-A personal perspective».’
Dr. Barrie Schwortz made a very interesting presentation highlighting Shroud image properties and showing previously unseen images, and talked about his experience as a S.T.U.R.P. member in 1978 studies in Turin, and mentioned the difficulties the team experienced to get the technical devices apprehended by italian authorities, and Father Peter Rinaldi’s help to get them back.
He uncovered some curious episodes like showing an image of the arguing between Dr. Max Frei and Dr John Jackson, because the former wanted to take sticky samples from the face, and Dr. John Jackson disagreed and was trying to prevent him of doing so.
He also talked about deleterious effects on the Shroud due to previous Max Frei’s uncareful method of taking surface samples with a “cheap” sticky tape.
Barrie Schwortz’s lecture was much appreciated by attendants and he had a lot of applause.
The lecture was beeing verbally tranlated to portuguese and italian so he had to stop often and ironically Barrie stated at he end that it had been the longest short lecture he presented, because actually it lasted more than one hour and half.
Afterwards Dr. Barrie Schwortz made the presentation of a new book in english language written by portuguese historian and archaeologist Dr. Carlos Evaristo entitled “The untold story of the Holy Shroud” which has an introduction written by himself.
Unfortunately we had to leave after lunch so we cannot describe afternoon ceremonies with the presence of royal family members from Portugal and Savoy Royal Houses., the visit to the Museum and medieval dinner at Ourém´s castle that would follow.
I’ll try to send you photographs and I hope the attachment will be successful.
warmest regardsMaria da Glória
(Centro Português de Sindonologia)