April 1, 2025 // Diocese

Expert Explores the Mystery of the Shroud of Turin

Scott Warden

Editor-In-Chief

On the evening of Thursday, March 27, Kathy Imler, director of the museum of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South bend, kicked off the grand opening of the museum’s newest permanent exhibit – a life-size replica of the Shroud of Turin, which many believe is the burial cloth of Christ.

Before introducing historian and shroud expert Cheryl White, the event’s keynote speaker, Imler informed the 200 or so people gathered at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Fort Wayne of what they can expect – both physically and spiritually – when visiting the exhibit.

“Unlike other museums, and other exhibits that we have, this exhibit is meant to be a more reflective, quiet, meditative room,” Imler said. “We’ll keep the lighting subdued so that visitors will have an opportunity to go in and contemplate the mysteries that they see in the shroud. I think tonight’s presentation will help a great deal in expanding your knowledge of the background and history of the shroud, as well as some forensic things that have occurred over time regarding the shroud.”

Then Imler succinctly summed up the full purpose of both the presentation to follow and the museum’s spectacular exhibit – both of which, she said, were meant to serve as “further opportunities to deepen our faith and our belief in Jesus Christ.”

At the beginning of her talk, White told the audience, simply, “That I’ve come to you tonight with a lifetime invested in the study and teaching about this incredible artifact that is the greatest mystery, I believe, that we have on planet Earth.”

White gave a quick overview of the history of the shroud – a piece of linen approximately 14-feet, 5-inches long and 3-feet, 7-inches wide that bears the image of a man who appears to have been tortured – or, more specifically, “a forensically accurate and anatomically perfect image of a man who has been scourged and crucified in Roman fashion; he has been capped with something thorny on his head and bears a wound on his right side between the fifth and sixth ribs.” White continued: “No one looks at that cloth and says, ‘There is a man who has been scourged and crucified, capped with thorns, and pierced in the side – gee, I wonder who that’s supposed to be?’ There’s only one unique individual in history who bears those exact wounds.”

White pressed on the fact that “there has been more academic study brought to bear on this 14-and-a-half-foot strip of linen than anything else I know exists. It has been studied from every academic discipline … chemistry, biology, physics, botany, hematology, historians, art historians, imaging specialists, photographers. It has been examined from every perspective academically that we can think of. And here is the philosophical challenge to that. … Anything that man creates, man can re-create. So if someone produced something like this in the 13th or 14th century, the man of the 20th or 21st century should be able to do the same. We can unpack everything that we know about it, and science will reveal enough of its natural phenomenon to us that we can recreate it. The philosophical challenge with the shroud is that it’s the inverse of that: The more we study it, the more mystery we are left with.”

White painstakingly went through detail after detail that observers of the shroud could see with their eyes – the height of the man pictured, the wounds he bears and the weapons that caused them, the blood stains, and the repairs to the linen that well-meaning religious sisters made in the 16th century. But what makes the shroud even more fascinating, White said, is what researchers have uncovered – mainly, that “there are no pigments, dyes, or paints of any kind in the linen that account for the image,” White said. “The image itself is actually the dehydrated top seven fibrils of that linen that was caused by a chemical reaction. Something happened in that linen so powerful and so quickly that it dehydrated the top seven fibrils of that linen, and it left a permanent image that is no deeper than what I said.”

White’s entire presentation was fascinating, informative, and more detailed than can be done justice in a brief article. And while it wasn’t livestreamed or recorded, you can find several similar talks she’s given on YouTube by searching for “Cheryl White and the Shroud of Turin.”

After her presentation, White was asked how her knowledge of the shroud has shaped her own faith life. 

“There’s a little bit of Thomas in all of us,” White told Today’s Catholic. “And we all have that place where our faith and our reason meet, and I think the shroud satisfies both of those for us.”

Still, White said that her faith in the Gospel isn’t at all reliant on the shroud being the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

“I’ve joked that if the shroud tomorrow was demonstrated to be some medieval artifact, and we know the process and the artist and all that, the only thing that changes for me is my travel schedule.”

Learn more about the diocesan museum and its new Shroud of Turin exhibit at diocesefwsb.org/museum.

Scott Warden is editor-in-chief of Today’s Catholic.