NARRATOR: This glass dome holds a grisly relic.
The hand belongs to a martyred saint.
Can it work miracles?
Is this is the true face of Jesus Christ?
How was this photographic image imprinted centuries
ago on the Turin Shroud?
The people of Naples live in fear of the power
of their patron saint.
But does this reliquary really hold
the blood of Saint Januarius?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C
Clarke, author "2001" and inventor
of the communication satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
Sri Lanka is a melting pot of religions,
where Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians
live and worship side by side.
Every year, one of the world's most spectacular festivals
takes place in Kandy, the ancient hill capital.
It's called the Perahera, and its centerpiece
is a colorful procession of elephants.
The Perahera is held in honor of the Lord Buddha, one of whose
teeth is preserved inside a set of magnificent jeweled caskets.
This tooth is just one of countless sacred relics
revered throughout the world.
Many are believed to possess miraculous powers.
NARRATOR: At Our Lady of Peace Church in Manhattan,
an expectant congregation hopes to witness miracles.
Father Peter Mary Rookey has been in the heating business
for 45 years.
He seems to exercise a strange power over his flock.
He believes the secret lies hidden inside this cross.
It fragments of bones from seven saints.
Father Peter Mary claims these relics can
bring comfort to the afflicted.
A gift of tears, that's a beautiful gift.
Let the tears flow.
Thank you, Jesus.
FATHER PETER MARY (VOICEOVER): The relics are very powerful,
and always have been.
By blessing people with our with our saints, their relics,
people were healed.
So more powerful than that, you cannot say, I guess.
--[INAUDIBLE] this to somebody here for a minute.
OK.
FATHER PETER MARY (VOICEOVER): Placing this reliquary crucifix
upon them, and blessing them with our saints,
we have seen the blind recover their sight, and the deaf hear,
and the lame walk.
NARRATOR: For this man, at least,
the relics appear to have worked wonders,
whether through unearthly intervention
or mere coincidence.
Sister Gregory of the Bar Convent
is custodian of Britain's greatest horde of relics.
She's lost count of how many she has.
There are two classes of relics.
There are first class relics, which are actually
part of the saint or the martyr, a bit of his bone,
a bit of his hair, a bit of his flesh.
Then there are second class relics, which are very much
more common, and those consist of a bit
of the clothing, or perhaps something
that's just touched the body.
This is the skull of Saint Victor, a Roman martyr.
We see he was a martyr from the palm around his skull.
And here, we have a very large collection of small relics.
Now, this is a little bit of the bone of Saint Cecilia.
And that is certainly a first class relic,
because it is part of her body.
And this, again, is part of the body of Saint Agnes.
Some saints, as soon as they died,
people were trying to take parts of their bodies.
St. Theresa of Avila, her community
had great difficulty in getting her buried,
because people were lying in wait to take parts of her body
in a really quite gruesome way.
I can't say that I have a favorite,
but I suppose perhaps if anything,
Margaret Clitherow's hand, because I
do admire her enormously.
She was a very, very brave woman.
NARRATOR: Margaret Clitherow was a 16th century
butcher's wife in York.
She became a Catholic when it was against the law to do so.
For giving sanctuary to persecuted priests,
she was condemned to a barbaric death.
Crushed beneath enormous weights,
she took 15 minutes to die.
Her body was then thrown on a dung hill
as a sign of disrespect, but after some days,
it was rescued by her friends, and they took off the hand.
And for about 200 years, it was kept in a little wooden box,
and then it was put into this reliquary and sealed in.
I don't know that any flesh could
exist in those circumstances for 400 years.
I think it must be supernatural.
Of all the world's religious relics,
the most studied is a length of cloth kept at Turin in Italy.
It's said to have wrapped the body of Christ
after he was crucified.
And pilgrims have been flocking to venerate
it for more than 400 years.
The search for the truth about the Turin Shroud
has caused bitter controversy among scientists and believers.
NARRATOR: The shroud is considered so sacred
that it's kept under top security in a sealed box
in Turin Cathedral.
A mass is held in its honor every year.
The linen cloth is 14 feet long.
The first certain record of it dates to the Middle Ages,
when it belonged to a crusader knight.
He put it on show, and claimed it
had wrapped the body of Christ.
But there were skeptics even then.
Pope Clement VII dismissed it as only a painting.
But this man's work restored believers' faith.
In 1898, Secondo Pia took a photograph of this,
but in his darkroom, this appeared.
The negative image shook the Christian world.
To millions, it is the true image of Christ.
An International Center in Turin is devoted
to the study of the shroud.
Its director is professor Bruno Barbaris.
The reason that we can be sure that it was a crucified man
is due to the fact that this we have a lot of signs
connected with the crucifixion.
In particular, we can see these wounds
on the wrists which are characteristic of the nail used
for the crucifixion.
We can see a lot of blood, the blood
coming down from the wounds of the wrist
and going along the arms.
We have to understand that the arms in the crucified position
are vertical, and not in this position, obviously.
We see also some other blood coming
to some wounds on the front and on the back of the head.
they are due to a crown of thorns.
We can see also on the back, and all of the back
until the feet, a lot of signs due to the flagellation.
It was surely a Roman flagellation,
because the number of the wounds are more than 120.
On the contrary, the Jews' flagellation stops at 39.
There is a very, very strong probability
that this man, Jesus of Nazareth as written in the Gospel,
and the man of the shroud, as we can see on this cloth,
are the same person.
NARRATOR: In 1978, the Church allowed
an international team of scientists
to study the shroud at close quarters.
To reveal its underside, the sisters of Saint Joseph
snipped it from its backing.
With sticky tape, the scientists lifted tiny fibers
from the blood-like stains.
A few precious samples were sent to Dr. Walter McCrone.
His Institute in Chicago specializes
in microscopic analysis.
And McCrone knows as much about blood stains
as anyone else on Earth.
In the search for truth, he gave up Christmas Day
to study the fibers.
The first thing that I did when I got the tapes back
here to Chicago was to take a look at them
under the microscope.
This is what one of the shroud tapes.
And the particles on the individual fibers
are apparent immediately, particularly
in bloodstained areas, there are more of them there.
I went to higher and higher magnifications
to be sure that I was seeing everything
that I needed to see, and realized very
soon that they were not blood.
What I was seeing were very fine particles, red, deep red
in color.
I'd seen this particular substance many times before.
I've worked a lot on Rembrandt and Raphael
imitations and other paintings.
And this is just red ochre.
NARRATOR: In order to be sure, McCrone
prepared two solutions, one of his own dilute blood,
the other of red ochre.
He painted them onto linen cloth,
and prepared microscopic slides.
First, he looked at the real blood.
When I look at this-- magnification right
now it's about 800 times-- And I see on the surface
of this blood-painted fibers brownish smear of something
that is not all small particles.
It's a continuous smeared layer over the surface,
and actually gluing, apparently, several of these fibers
together.
I then decided to compare this with this slide
of a red ochre painted spot.
I'm now looking at fibers that look very different from those
from the blood-painted area.
These fibers all show individual, tiny, very dark
little red particles, very, very different from any
smeared coating of the blood.
They look, in other words, exactly
like the fibers and the particles
that I saw with the shroud.
I don't think I have any doubt that the shroud, then,
and the red ochre-painted spots are identical.
And therefore, the shroud is a painting.
NARRATOR: But the believers would not be convinced.
10 years later, the Church agreed to the ultimate test.
Carbon-14 dating would at last establish
when the cloth was made.
But this meant doing the unthinkable,
cutting the sacred shroud.
Samples were sent to laboratories
in three different countries.
Their verdict was unanimous.
The shroud is medieval.
But establishing when the Turin shroud was made
has still left one question unanswered.
How was the image created?
NARRATOR: In California, Sam Pellicori thinks he knows.
He is convinced that a real corpse made the image, even
if the body was not Christ's.
The hypothesis is that it's a result
of a direct contact between the skin
of the corpse and the linen.
The skin of the corpse contains perspiration and body oils,
and I believe these helped stimulate the yellowing,
the degradation, of the linen.
I tested the theory by employing a student to work
up a good, healthy sweat.
This produces the body oils and perspiration products that
a stressed body would produced.
And lightly applying the linen to the skin,
and the linen picks up a very minute amount
of the perspiration or oils.
And in the case of the shroud, this [INAUDIBLE] image press
took tens of years to develop and become visible.
What I'm doing here with this experiment
is accelerating that naturally occurring process.
The yellowing of cellulose is a naturally occurring process.
It does not require the presence of pigments or
any other artistic application.
We have applied well known cellulose chemistry,
and it seems to fit.
It seems to fit very well.
This appears to be the beard, his eyes, and his hair.
I think we solved at least one of the mysteries of the shroud
of Turin, probably the most fascinating one,
namely how the image was produced.
NARRATOR: On the other side of America,
shroud skeptics need only a plaster
face, a wet linen cloth, and some nifty fingerwork.
The fingers belong to university lecturer John Nickell.
So even just in a moment's work,
we've begun to see what it looks like.
And then we keep working it as it dries.
Once the cloth is thoroughly dry,
we can now take the pigment, which we've prepared
from red iron oxide, and we simply
apply this to the high spots.
As we apply the pigment, we see the prominences
is becoming darkened, and the deeper recesses are missed.
This will begin now to make a negative image.
These materials are exactly what a forger working in the middle
of the 14th century would have had available-- a bas-relief,
cloth in the herringbone tool pattern,
a simple dauber, and some earth pigments, iron earth pigments.
Certainly, this is a plausible explanation
for the shroud image.
This is what we end up with.
Of course, it's still taking on some
of the shape of the relief, but that's the image.
Now, when we take a photograph of this
and reverse the negative, we reverse the darks and lights,
and this is what we get, the shroud photographed.
NARRATOR: On New York's 9th Avenue,
retired chemist Raymond Drakoff is
about to put his own shroud making theory to the test.
The requirements are a bronze bust of Dante
and a friendly Italian baker.
How you doing Ray?
I got everything ready.
Come on in.
Follow me.
OK, Ray, so what are you gonna do?
I'm gonna try to bake the statue.
I'm gonna put in the hot oven, heat it up
to about 600 degrees, and then we'll take it out,
and we'll work on it from there.
Throw them in the inferno.
All right.
600 degrees warm enough for you?
I think it's gonna be warm, least as a first try.
OK.
Want me to put it in for you?
Yeah.
Put it in.
Into the bowels of hell.
Here you go.
The idea came from the fact that the image is a negative.
And obviously, these people had no access to such things
like photography.
So the only way that could have happened
create an image was to take a very hot statute,
place a cloth on it, and scorch the features.
The statue that we have selected has prominent features.
It has an aquiline nose, a strong jaw.
And this would possibly be easy to show on a cloth.
Need the gloves?
I could probably use a glove, maybe.
Does it matter which way you put the cloth on
to get a different impression?
No.
Or the type of cloth?
The type of cloth we try to get as close as possible
to the cloud that might have been used in the holy land
at the time, natural linen. All right.
Let's take it off.
OK.
Another image.
I think what we have to do is to put it in the oven
again, and run it as hot as possible.
I think you're gonna make history, Ray.
NARRATOR: This time, Raymond uses a wet cloth.
This'll be more dramatic, because you
will see the steam rising.
It'll make for perhaps a better image.
The burning image of Christ.
Looks like a death mask almost.
That's what it's supposed to be.
Do you think it was just corrupt bakers
in the middle ages what were doing this, or?
Corrupt bakers.
It could have been that.
It could have been statue-makers.
Corrupt bakers from Turin, huh?
All right.
OK. What do we get?
It's about the same image.
OK.
[INAUDIBLE] it's gonna be easier if I show you down here,
and we see the correspondence of the features.
The headband here, the crest, eyebrow, the nose,
the sallow cheeks, which corresponds
to that on the image of Christ.
And the nose, the shape of the scorch mark
is close to the shape of the nose as we see it.
It looks like the Shroud of Turin.
You sold me, Ray.
It's the Shroud of 9th Avenue.
Even to science, the most rational of disciplines,
the blood of St. Januarius presents
an intriguing challenge.
NARRATOR: Twice a year, city of Naples
waits to learn its destiny.
This vial is set to contain the blood of St. Januarius,
Naples' patron saint.
In an anxious procession, the Neapolitans
carry the reliquary through the streets of the city.
St. Januarius was beheaded in the 4th century.
According to legend, his blood was saved,
and has miraculous properties.
Against all the laws of science, it
can turn from solid to liquid.
The faithful dread the times the miracle fails.
In history, disaster has followed--
plague, pestilence, and famine.
[SPEAKING LATIN]
NARRATOR: The blood stays clotted.
The tension rises.
[SPEAKING LATIN]
Doctors and chemists know that when blood is poured
into a container, it's impossible for it
to liquefy and solidify over and over again.
So either the blood of St. Januarius really is miraculous,
or there's some other explanation.
NARRATOR: Two scientists, Luigi Garlaschelli
and Sergio Della Sala, believe they found
the answer over a hamburger.
They claim the blood is thixotropic.
They'd seen something similar in the cafe.
The first thing that crossed our mind is ketchup sauce.
As you can see, ketchup is solid.
And if you think what you have to do when you use it,
you don't just pour it, as you do with water.
You vibrate it or mechanically agitate it until it becomes
more fluid, until when you can use it on the top of your pizza
or on your hamburger.
And if you let it stand for a while,
it will resolidify again.
I had to try to find out what thixotropic solution
or substances I could use, and possibly
using medieval materials.
I just wanted to have my personal miracle in my lab.
NARRATOR: Garlaschelli began with a simple solution
of ferric chloride and water.
Ferric chloride now is a very cheap and common chemical.
You can buy it in a drug store.
But in the Middle Ages, the only place
where you can find it in nature was in active volcanoes,
like, for example, Mt.
Vesuvius.
NARRATOR: He added crushed eggshell, the medieval version
of calcium carbonate, then purified
the solution through a bladder, and left it to evaporate.
What happens is that this solution after a while
will become gel, like this, for example.
it's thick gel.
You can turn it upside down, and it's solid.
But once it's shaken, it will become fluid.
And more and more fluid.
And I had reproduced a miracle in my lab,
a miracle of science.
NARRATOR: The miracle of God is more elusive.
But after two days of prayer, the Neapolitans'
patience is finally rewarded.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
NARRATOR: Naples can rest easy till the next time.
I've been wary of miracles since I
heard the following story.
Not long ago, people in this part of the world
rushed to buy water from a miraculous
spring bubbling up in the sea.
Only later did scientific tests reveal
the stomach-churning truth-- the holy water
came from a broken sewage pipe.
As for religious relics, I believe that most are fakes,
but many are perfectly genuine.
It doesn't really matter.
For true believers, they'll work anyway.