imageA reader writes:

One of your readers said that he knew nothing of the restoration. He is certainly not alone. Most people who know about the shroud don’t know about the so-called restoration.

He seemed almost aghast that the cloth was vacuumed. Certainly data was saved, he thought, maybe. ”I am simply in disbelief and shock that such a thing could or would be allowed to happen,” he wrote.

Well it did happen. If you want a good account, read Meacham’s “The Rape of the Shroud”.

For a shorter version, read these words of Ray Rogers.

However, isn’t anyone aware that surface methods have been made useless by the "restoration" of 2002? The surface was scraped, vacuumed, steamed, stretched, and handled. No consideration was given to the structure or composition of the surfaces of fibers, and no attempt was made to preserve that information. Two thousand years of chemical history was destroyed by persons who did not think about or understand the problems. This was a disaster! Any ethical scientist would have asked for consultation before doing something so important and irreversible.

It was a first class disaster, a wholly unjustified disaster, done secretly, so it seems, so as not to be prevented from doing so. It boggles the mind.