The Vatican said Saturday it would consider subjecting the shroud of Turin to "any serious and competent" new tests to determine whether it is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus.
"The causes of the formation of the image remain completely mysterious," Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls said of the cotton shroud that bears bloodstains and a faint brown body outline of what many believe is the image of Jesus.A series of three radiocarbon tests of the shroud in 1988 commissioned by the Holy See concluded the shroud is not a genuine historic relic and that it dated only to between A.D. 1260 and 1390, long after Jesus' death.
Navarro Valls said those 1988 tests were "unusual and in contrast" with previous tests on the textile.
So he said that "in the future, as in the past, the church will take into consideration any serious and competent working proposal without imposing any conditions except that of causing no damage to the holy shroud."
Navarro Valls also said Saturday that Pope John Paul II had named Monsignor Giovanni Saldarini, the archbishop of Turin, to replace Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero as the caretaker of the shroud.
The 1988 independent tests conducted by three laboratories were to be considered "an experimental datum among others with the validity, but also the limits, of the sectors examined that must be integrated into a multidisciplinary picture," Navarro Valls said.
At the time, the Vatican said Roman Catholics should continue their veneration of the shroud only as a pictorial image of Christ capable of performing miracles.
But last year, experts on religious artifacts met in Bologna, Italy, and questioned the validity of the 1988 tests.
Authorities such as Brother Bruno Bonnet-Eymard of France said the carbon-dating tests on samples of the shroud by researchers in England, the United States and Switzerland did not necessarily discredit its authenticity.
The convention said the material of the shroud was too contaminated with foreign matter to allow for any definitive scientific determination of its age.