Eric Olson and a cameraman for 21 Alive, a local ABC affiliate in the Wabash area, have posted a wonderful story, Wabash Man to open Museum on Shroud of Turin. The story along with some really excellent video is on the station’s website. The Wabash man, as all American shroudies know, is everyone’s friend, Richard Orareo:
WABASH, Indiana (21Alive) – It is the most iconic relic of the Christian faith…the Shroud of Turin…the linen cloth many believe covered the body of Christ as it lay in the tomb. A cloth on which the image of a man, battered and bloodied, is inexorably etched on the surface. A relic venerated the world over, and particularly in one corner of 21 country.
In Wabash Indiana, in what was once the founder of the Honeywell Corporation Mark Honeywell’s private movie theatre, Richard Orareo is building the National Museum of the Holy Shroud.
Orareo is a former educator, a devoted Catholic and for forty years now a prolific collector of images, books and relics related to the Shroud of Turin.
The Shroud was brought from the Holy Land to Europe during the Crusades. It spent centuries in the care of the House of Savoy, the royal family of the Italian state of Turin, who bequeathed it to the Pope in 1983. Orareo’s collection includes rare photographs, including the first ever taken of the Shroud in 1898. Rare silk images of the Shroud dating back to the 15th century. This small box contains relics, pieces of bone, from the four Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But it is that image, that face burned onto the linen cloth that is the real focus of his life’s work.
The video runs for about three minutes. It is worth your time.
Interesting choice of “burned” considering Ray Rogers’ prolific words: The crystal structure of the flax fiber of the Shroud shows the effect of aging, but it has never been heated enough to change the structure. It has never suffered chemically significant radiation with either protons or neutrons. No type of radiation that could produce either color in the linen fibers or change in the C14 content (radiocarbon age) could go unnoticed. All radiation has some kind of an effect on organic materials. This proves that the image color could not have been produced by thermal or radiation-induced dehydration of the cellulose. Image formation proceeds at normal temperatures in the absence of energetic radiation of any kind.