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Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Shrouded in Code

The Fair Amy wants to know where the Shroud is....

Well, it's not on public display for the Olympics -- it's only on public view once a decade or thereabout. But it's still the biggest thing in Torino, even now -- bigger than Bode, if you can believe that.

I think she was asking about the television coverage, though. And there it did appear. NBC ran a six-minute piece on it Monday morning during the vaunted 7.37 segment of the Today show. I didn't actually see the package, but overheard it, and if you've got half a brain, it was easy to tell that the piece was constructed to pull on the audience's DaVinci Code-loving conspiracy strings.

Blech.

All you need to know about the Shroud is this: in the '70s, when one of the 19 million forensic teams which have examined it over time was sent from the States, John Krol (the third Pharaoh of Philadelphia, for the uninformed) dispatched his own personal physician, Joseph Gambescia, to go and take a gander at it.

Admittedly, this is the ecclesiology of my native church at its finest, but if Pharaoh saw fit to send his own chief medic over to examine the thing, it must be Jesus. No questions, next topic.

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