supernatural gestures, the Vatican failed to meet its own strict criteria in the case of the alleged Newman miracle. On a separate issue, Mr Howse believes that I am against Newman being made a saint sim- ply because I quote Newman’s oft repeated remark that he had “no tendency to be one”. I make no such link. I simply repeat Newman’s statement as a matter of irony, and yet another reason for entitling my book:

Newman’s Unquiet Grave: the reluctant saint.

John Cornwell

Cambridge

jc224@cam.ac.uk

Translation without the options

The composer James MacMillan says (News from Britain and Ireland, 8 May) that his set- ting of the new Mass translation for the Pope’s visit to Scotland, will be “the first time that the new translation has been used in the English-speaking world”. He also said, “I like the new translation, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.” For the last two years (2008 and 2009) that my wife and I have visited our son and his family in South Africa (Cape Town), the new translation has been used at the Masses we attended there. We didn’t like it (in par- ticular the dualistic-type language that splits the spirit and body), but unfortunately it seems that we will not have the same options as Mr McMillan, we will not be able to not “do it”, as it will apparently be foisted upon us when it is eventually introduced!

Brian and Maureen Devine

Leigh-on-Sea, Essex maurbri13@yahoo.co.uk

Authenticity of the Shroud

David Sox’s article on the Turin Shroud (“Shrouded in mystery”, 8 May) is seriously out of touch with recent insights on the subject. Sox suggested that the Vatican lay behind

a murky and inconclusive “pre-test” carried out on a Shroud thread prior to the official radiocarbon dating test in 1988. There is not a shred of evidence for the Vatican’s involve- ment, and as I show in my new book The Shroud (Bantam Press), the Shroud’s Turin custodians positively insisted on controlling the scientific work carried out at that time. Those custodians made some scientifically bad choices, not least the location they selected for the single sample they apportioned between the three dating laboratories. As any archaeologist can confirm, if an object gets con- taminated by happenings in its history, it is easy for the radiocarbon measurement to become skewed, “rogue” dates being rather more common than popularly realised. In the 1960s, a Harwell radiocarbon dating scien- tist warned that the various contaminating circumstances of the Shroud’s known history could well have rendered it unsuitable for the carbon-dating method. It was tragic that no one made this clear when the Shroud dating results were announced in 1988. Sox suggests that the figure on the Shroud could be that of the Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay. I know of no credible docu - mentary evidence for Jacques de Molay having been crucified. The Knight and Lomas

20 | THE TABLET | 22 May 2010

book The Hiram Key (Century), which pro - mulgated this idea in 1996, is unscholarly in the extreme. Is Sox seriously suggesting that de Molay was not only crucified, but crowned with thorns, speared in the side, laid out as if dead in the Shroud, revived, only then burnt at the stake? And why should de Molay’s body have been the only one in history, alive or dead, to have created such a unique imprint as that seen on the Shroud? In my book I show that the historical record for a cloth answering the essentially unique characteristics of what we today call the Turin Shroud – that is, a large linen cloth bearing Jesus’ face and figure imprinted in some man- ner not by the hand of an artist – can be traced all the way back to the first century. It needs just one ultimately simple identification – that the Shroud we know today was one and the same as a Christ imprinted cloth historians call the “image of Edessa”, lost from Byzantine Constantinople when Crusaders captured the city in 1204. A theory first formulated over 30 years ago, there have been significant recent discoveries in its support.

Ian Wilson

Kenmore Hills, Queensland, Australia ian.wilson@hotkey.net.au

The carbon date of the Shroud does not explain why it contains limestone dust with a simi- lar spectrograph to Jerusalem limestone dust; it is thicker where the foot rested than elsewhere. Nor does it explain the grains of pollen dust that originate from two species of plants that only grow in the deserts of Judaea. Nor those of four further species that only grow in Turkey. Both Edessa (Urfa) and Istanbul have trad - itions of owning the Shroud in the early Middle Ages. Nor does it explain how four very accur - ate copies of the face on the Shroud exist between the sixth and twelfth centuries AD. Nor does it explain why the nails go through the wrists and not the hands. Easy, that one. Only by going through the wrists are the bones strong enough to support the body weight. It is a fact totally ignored by every painter and sculptor of the Crucifixion, and by every fraudulent mystic producing signs of the stigmata in their hands.

Felicity Crow

Ruscombe, Stroud, Gloucestershire

Straggling boundaries

You report (News from Britain and Ireland, 8 May) that plans are being drawn up to reduce the number of dioceses in the Irish Church. Congratulations to the Irish Church. With the clustering of parishes taking place in England and Wales, when will the dioceses of England and Wales start clustering and reduce? Requests to have our electoral boundaries modernised pale into comparison with cur- rent church boundaries where we have the Westminster Province stretching up to the out- skirts of Manchester (Hadfield, Stockport) and the River Humber.

(Fr) Gordon Beattie OSB

Parbold, Lancashire gordonbeattie@hotmail.com

The living Spirit

O Holy Third neglected and forgot, Gap in our knowledge and imagination, whom we adore as under regulation, Believing dully, understanding not … Ineffable Love between the First and Other,

Whom humanly we know as Lord and Brother;

Intangible Love of Theirs for us, so warm

That it becomes a Person and a Form, Descending Dove and Fire all glorious. Make Thyself slowly, surely, real to us.

Kathleen M. Hall

“Whit Sunday”

An Odd Kind of Courage

(Kathleen M. Hall, 2007)

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me And illumines the darkness of my heart? You lead me like a mother’s hand, And should you let go of me,

I would not know how to take another step. You are the space That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.

Away from you it sinks into the abyss Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.

You, nearer to me than I to myself And more interior than my most interior And still impalpable and intangible And beyond any name: Holy Spirit eternal love! …

Are you the sweet song of love And of holy awe That eternally resounds around the triune throne,

That weds in itself the clear chimes of each and every being?

The harmony, That joins together the members to the Head,

In which each one Finds the mysterious meaning of his being blessed

And joyously surges forth, Freely dissolved in your surging: Holy Spirit eternal jubilation!

Edith Stein

www.karmel.at/ics/edith/stein_24.html

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