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ROME - A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus.

Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.

Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, says in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the cloth.

She asserts that the words include the name "(J)esu(s) Nazarene" - or Jesus of Nazareth - in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.

"Even someone intent on forging a relic would have had all the reasons to place the signs of divinity on this object," Frale said Friday. "Had we found 'Christ' or the 'Son of God' we could have considered it a hoax, or a devotional inscription."

The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping from his hands and feet, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen's fibers at the time of his resurrection.

The fragile artifact, owned by the Vatican, is kept locked in a protective chamber in a Turin cathedral and is rarely shown. Measuring 13 feet (four meters) long and three feet (one meter) wide, the shroud has suffered severe damage through the centuries, including from fire.

The Catholic Church makes no claims about the cloth's authenticity, but says it is a powerful symbol of Christ's suffering.

There has been strong debate about it in the scientific community.

Skeptics point out that radiocarbon dating conducted on the cloth in 1988 determined it was made in the 13th or 14th century.

But Raymond Rogers of Los Alamos National Laboratory said in 2005 that the tested threads came from patches used to repair the shroud after a fire. Rogers, who died shortly after publishing his findings, calculated it is 1,300 to 3,000 years old and could easily date from Jesus' era.

Another study, by the Hebrew University, concluded that pollen and plant images on the shroud showed it originated in the area around Jerusalem sometime before the eighth century.

While faint letters scattered around the face on the shroud were seen decades ago, serious researchers dismissed them, due to the results of the radiocarbon dating test, Frale told The Associated Press.

But when she cut out the words from enhanced photos of the shroud and showed them to experts, they concurred the writing style was typical of the Middle East in the first century - Jesus' time.

She believes the text was written on a document by a clerk and glued to the shroud over the face so the body could be identified by relatives and buried properly. Metals in the ink used at the time may have allowed the writing to transfer to the linen, Frale said.

She said she counted at least 11 words in her study of enhanced images produced by French scientists in a 1994 study. The words are fragmented and scattered on and around the image's head, crisscrossing the cloth vertically and horizontally. One short sequence of Aramaic letters has not been fully translated. Another fragment in Greek - "iber" - may refer to Emperor Tiberius, who reigned at the time of Jesus' crucifixion, Frale said.

She said the text also partially confirms the Gospels' account of Jesus' final moments. A fragment in Greek that can be read as "removed at the ninth hour" may refer to Christ's time of death reported in the holy texts, she said.

In her book "The Shroud of Jesus Nazarene," published in Italian, Frale reconstructs from the lettering on the shroud what she believes Jesus' death certificate said: "Jesus Nazarene. Found (guilty of inciting the people to revolt). Put to death in the year 16 of Tiberius. Taken down at the ninth hour."

She said the text then stipulates the body will returned to relatives after a year.

Frale said her research was done without the support of the Vatican.

"I tried to be objective and leave religious issues aside," Frale told the AP. "What I studied was an ancient document that certifies the execution of a man, in a specific time and place."

Frale's work usually focuses on medieval documents. She is noted for research on the order of the Knights Templar and her discovery of unpublished documents on the group in the Vatican's archives.

Earlier this year, she published a study saying the Templars once had the shroud in their possession. That raised eyebrows because the order was abolished in the early 14th century and the shroud is first recorded in history around 1360 in the hands of a French knight.

Her latest book on the shroud raised even more doubts among some experts.

On one hand, it is true that a medieval forger would label the object with Christ's name, as were all relics produced at the time, said Antonio Lombatti, a church historian who has written about the shroud. The problem is that there are no inscriptions to be seen in the first place.

"People work on grainy photos and think they see things," Lombatti told the AP. "It's all the result of imagination and computer software. ... If you look at a photo of the shroud, there's a lot of contrast between light and dark, but there are no letters."

Further criticizing Frale's work, Lombatti said that artifacts bearing Greek and Aramaic texts were found in Jewish burials from the first century, but the use of Latin is unheard of.

He also rejected the idea that authorities would officially return the body of a crucified man to relatives after filling out some paperwork. Victims of that form of execution used by the Romans would usually be left on the cross or were disposed of in a dump to add to its deterrent.

Lombatti said "the message was that you won't even have a tomb to cry over."

Another shroud expert, Gian Marco Rinaldi, said that even scientists who believe in the relic's authenticity have dismissed as unreliable the images on which Frale's study was based.

"These computer enhancements increase contrast in an unrealistic way to bring out these signs," he said. "You can find them all over the shroud, not just near the head, and then with a bit of imagination, you see letters."

Unusual sightings in the shroud are common and are often proved false, said Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pavia. He recently led a team of experts that reproduced the shroud using materials and methods available in the 14th century - proof, they said, that it could have been made by a human hand in the Middle Ages.

Decades ago, entire studies were published on coins purportedly seen on Jesus' closed eyes, but when high-definition images were taken during a 2002 restoration, the artifacts were nowhere to be seen and the theory was dropped, Garlaschelli said.

He said any theory about ink and metals would have to be checked by analysis of the shroud itself.

The last public display of the shroud was in 2000, when more than 1 million people turned up to see it. The next is scheduled for 2010, and Pope Benedict XVI has been asked to visit it.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

(RNS) In late September, Lutheran dissidents said they would hunker down for a year and study whether to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and create a new church body.

Less than two months later, on Wednesday (Nov. 19) Lutheran CORE (Coalition for Renewal) announced that indeed such a body "will likely be necessary."

"What happened was the idea of a discussion for a year became kind of scary for people who want to leave now," said the Rev. David Baer, a CORE spokesman and pastor of an ELCA church in Whitewood, S.D.

Baer said his own church will vote this weekend on whether to join CORE, which he estimates counts around 700 congregations as members.

CORE said no "firm decisions" have been made about how the new church body will be structured; recommendations will be released in February. "The working committee is just beginning their work," Baer said. "What we've done is paint a little picture of what a church body will look like."

Conservative Lutherans have been distressed since the ELCA's Churchwide Assembly voted in August to allow gays and lesbians in committed, same-sex relationships to be ordained as clergy. The assembly also voted to allow congregations to recognize and support such relationships.

"The vote on sexuality opened the eyes of many to how far the ELCA has moved from biblical teaching," the Rev. Paull Spring, CORE's chair, said in a statement Wednesday.

ELCA spokesman John Brooks said CORE's announcement was expected.

"We are staying focused on our clear priorities and clear mission. More than 10,000 congregations that want to be part of that mission."

Five congregations have taken the two votes necessary to leave the ELCA since the Churchwide Assembly, Brooks said. The ELCA has approximately 4.6 million members spread across 10,300 congregations.

Eighty-seven congregations have taken the first vote, and 28 of those did not attain the two-thirds majority required to leave the denomination, Brooks said.

"That two-thirds hurdle is a big hurdle for some congregations," Baer said.

By Daniel Burke
Copyright 2009 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.

(RNS) Did alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan lose control, at least in part, because he was sexually frustrated?

That's one of the questions being asked in the investigation into the Nov. 5 rampage that left 13 people dead and dozens more injured.

According to reports, Hasan visited a nearby strip club in the weeks before the massacre and was frustrated by his inability to find a pious Muslim wife.

That's sparked a recurring, but still unresolved, debate on whether strict Islamic sexual mores in Muslim communities are contributing to a sense of hopelessness some say drives many young men into religious fanaticism and violence.

"All these men are so sexually deprived so much so that the sperm has gone to their brain, and they implode," wrote Ani Zonneveld, a female Muslim activist, on a Muslim online discussion forum which had taken up the issue.

Others are more skeptical about the claim, and say that if there's a relationship between religious fundamentalism and sexual repression or frustration, it is not unique to Muslims.

"I'm skeptical," said Kecia Ali, a religion professor at Boston University. People have tried to link Islamic extremism and sexual frustration for years, she said, but a causal relationship "was a bit of a stretch."

For many, however, the most perplexing question is why men who see themselves as devout Muslims engage in such un-Islamic behavior. Hasan, 39, is reported have visited the Starz strip club at least three times in weeks leading up to the shooting, spending up to six or seven hours at a time.

"He said he was a medic and that he was being deployed soon, but mostly he wanted to ask us questions," Jennifer Jenner, a stripper who Hasan paid $50 for a lap dance in the private room, told Foxnews.com.

"He was respectful."

Mohamed Atta and several other 9/11 hijackers had also visited strip clubs not long before the 2001 terrorist attacks. In his will, however, Atta demanded that women not come to his funeral and not visit his grave, and that whoever washed his body should wear gloves when washing his genitals. Scholars stress that among mainstream Muslims in America, women regularly participate in funerals, and probably don't consider the minutia that consumed Atta.

In his novel "Murder In Amsterdam," based on the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, British journalist Ian Buruma suggests that sexual frustration played a part in driving Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-born son of Moroccan immigrants, to murder Van Gogh in broad daylight in 2004.

As a teenager, Bouyeri smoked dope and chased Dutch women, but in his 20s, he faced bleak economic prospects, girl troubles, and his sister got a boyfriend. Bouyeri "felt dishonored, useless, and excluded," Buruma writes, but says Bouyeri found his source of power in radical Islam.

And one of the leading philosophical fathers of radical Islam, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, was critical of the U.S. as an exchange student between 1948-50, especially of what he called the "animal-like mixing" of the sexes, even at church dances.

Many suicide bombers from Palestine and Iraq are said to be motivated by Islamic interpretations -- albeit highly disputed -- that 72 virgins await Muslim martyrs when they arrive in paradise.

The frustration that drives Muslim men to violence has at least as much to do with economic and social factors as it does with sexual troubles, observers say. High unemployment rates in many parts of the world complicate job prospects, where a steady income is a prerequisite to getting a wife, and where pre-marital sex can result in social ostracizing, jail, and whipping.

"If you can't get a job," Ali said, "you can't get a girlfriend."

Evidence, however, does not point to a link between sexual frustration and Islamic extremism, says Marc Sageman, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

"In fact, three-fourths of al-Qaida terrorists are married, and two-thirds of them have children (and many children at that)," he wrote in his 2004 essay, "Common Myths About al-Qaida Terrorism." "This apparent paradox is explained by the fact that they want many children to pursue jihad, while they sacrifice themselves for their cause and their comrades."

Another perplexing paradox is why men like Hasan and Atta, who see themselves as devout Muslims, go to strip clubs and engage in other un-Islamic behavior. "It's so inconsistent with the portrayals of these guys as pious Muslims," said Pamela Taylor, co-founder of Muslims for Progressive Values. "It doesn't make sense."

"There's a cultural double-standard," said Ali. Many Muslim men view both Western women and Muslim women as mainly sexual objects, but hold different standards for Western culture that they view as lost to vanity and promiscuity. "They don't expect their sisters to act like that."

While Zonneveld said she sees a connection between sexual frustration and violence, she emphasizes it is not unique to Islamic cultures.

"I say the route to violence is through intolerance, and it doesn't matter what religion or perspective you hold," she said. "You see that in the anarchists against capitalism, Jewish settlers against Palestinians, and of course these so-called Muslims."

By OMAR SACIRBEY
Copyright 2009 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.

(RNS) After disgraced evangelical leader Ted Haggard decided to start holding prayer meetings at his Colorado home, advisers and observers, perhaps not surprisingly, reacted with disappointment.

But the fact that he's chosen to host the meetings within a few miles of the Colorado Springs megachurch that dismissed him three years ago -- because of a sex and drug scandal involving a male escort -- has drawn stronger reactions.

"When you think of the ethics of that, it, to me, just defies explanation," said the Rev. H.B. London, who chaired Haggard's restoration committee and is vice president of church and clergy at Focus on the Family, also in Colorado Springs.

The Rev. Joe Trull, editor of the journal Christian Ethics Today, said starting a religious gathering near one's former church is "disrupting" and can lead to accusations of "sheep stealing" from a former flock.

"I don't think he should ever start a church or a group in the same community as his former church," said Trull, co-author of a book on ministerial ethics. "That's just verboten."

Ethicists say cases of clergy who've fallen from grace run the gamut, as does the appropriateness of their return to ministry. While some succeed and turn to work beyond the pulpit -- such as chaplaincies or writing opportunities -- others never are able to minister again.

Haggard's decision to start the prayer gatherings after the high-profile scandal has drawn support from the more than 100 attendees at his first prayer meeting on Nov. 12, as well as criticism from hundreds of responses to an online column by London that questioned his return. His former New Life Church said in a brief statement that it wished "him and his family only the best."

Ironically, Haggard's former church, which now attracts thousands of worshippers, was born out of small sessions he held in his basement nearly 25 years ago.

Both London and Michael Ware, who served on the board of overseers at New Life shortly after Haggard's dismissal, recalled that Haggard assured them he would never start a new church in Colorado Springs.

"It was the decision of the... overseers that Ted relocate to a city of his choice for his future and for his restoration," said Ware, senior pastor of Victory Church in Denver. "That was just what we recommended was the most healthy thing for him at that time."

Haggard, who also resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals in the wake of the scandal, did move away for a time and lived in Arizona. Last year, New Life announced that Haggard had ended a "spiritual restoration" process and had an "accountability relationship" with Pastor Tommy Barnett of Phoenix First Assembly, who had been on the restoration committee.

"It was pretty much of a mutual thing, because we saw that it wasn't really going anywhere," London said of the committee, which also included the Rev. Jack Hayford, former president of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. "We were concerned about his lack of submission to spiritual authority."

Attempts to reach Haggard for comment were unsuccessful. His home voicemail message includes an announcement about the time of the prayer meeting, and his Twitter account noted the name of the worship leader for the second session on Thursday (Nov. 19).

"This will be great!" he wrote.

The Gazette in Colorado Springs reported that Haggard says he now has a self-selected "accountability team" of five pastors from nondenominational evangelical churches, and has met with them for the past several months.

Glen Stassen, a professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, said he believes forgiveness is a central aspect of recovery from a scandal like Haggard's, but so is an appropriate process including discipline.

"I am not a perfect person myself," said Stassen. "I'm really reluctant to be judgmental, but I really am in favor of restoration and disciplined processes and staying with them."

Stassen said it may be possible for people "who have done something far worse" than Haggard's transgressions to be restored.

"Will the person be honest in the future and will the person be faithful to others?" are questions that must be asked in circumstances like Haggard's, he said.

"`Sometimes we can do that, we can be restored, but sometimes if people don't go through the process, they may not."

London has had personal experience with that process, having watched the "failure" of his father, a prominent pastor who had an affair with his secretary but who went on to become a seminary president after a five-year period of restoration.

After the Haggard scandal, the younger London's ministry at Focus created a booklet on "Pastoral Restoration." He estimates that about half of those who enter such a process succeed.

But London wishes any attempts at future success by the former pastor had happened later, and elsewhere.

"We know it's a free country," he said. "We're just disappointed that it ended up this way."

Copyright 2009 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.

BALTIMORE (RNS) Gay Catholics and victims of clergy sexual abuse are hailing preliminary results of a study commissioned by U.S. Catholic bishops that says gay priests are no more likely than straight clergy to sexually abuse minors.

Still, some bishops gathered here for the final day of their semi-annual meeting said it is premature to say whether the church leaders who had asserted such a link were wrong.

Researchers from New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice on Tuesday (Nov. 17) presented initial findings from their multi-year study of the clergy sexual abuse scandal, which has resulted in some 14,000 claims of abuse and cost the U.S. Catholic Church about $2.6 billion in settlements since 1950.

The study, which is due to be completed next year, was commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops after the scandal overtook the U.S. church in 2002.

In a presentation to the bishops on Tuesday, Margaret Smith of John Jay said: "What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse. At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and the increased likelihood of subsequent abuse from the data that we have right now."

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of the gay Catholic group DignityUSA, called the report "very welcome news for gay people, gay priests, and our families and friends."

She said the John Jay report confirms other studies in concluding that sexual orientation is not connected to pedophilia or other sex crimes. "We hope that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church will finally accept this finding, since it has been borne out through their own study," Duddy-Burke said.

Some bishops, however, said it is too early to draw conclusions about the researchers' findings.

"I wouldn't put a lot of credence in it," said Archbishop John Nienstedt of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

After the abuse crisis rocked the church in 2002, Nienstedt helped lead a Vatican investigation of U.S. seminaries aimed at rooting out homosexuality, and served on a committee that drew up new sex abuse prevention policies for U.S. dioceses. He has also written that homosexual orientation is the result of childhood trauma.

Smith and her co-author, Karen Terry, stressed on Tuesday that access to young boys, rather than a homosexual orientation, was largely responsible for the high percentage of male abuse cases. "It's important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior," Terry said. "Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity."

Still, Nienstedt said "a priest has to be accessible to all his people, and someone with a strong same-sex attraction would not be good to have in the pastoral care of people."

Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston said Wednesday that the researchers' conclusions still "need to be teased out."

"I think it needs to be explained better then it was," he said. "I think that's why you saw some of the bishops challenge (the researchers)."

In 2005, the Vatican issued new guidelines barring men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from the priesthood. Bishop Edward Braxton of Belleville, Ill., asked Smith and Terry on Tuesday whether homosexuality should continue to be a factor in excluding some clergy candidates.

"If that exclusion were based on the fact that that person would be more probable than any other candidate to abuse, we do not find that at this time," Smith responded.

But the view that gay men are largely responsible for the sexual abuse scandal pervades the church hierarchy, said David Gibson, a Catholic journalist and author, and will not necessarily be overcome by the John Jay study.

"I think it will give cover to the bishops who want to continue to admit gay men into the seminary, as I think a majority of them want to do," Gibson said. "For those bishops dead-set against having any homosexuals in the priesthood, it won't make a difference."

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said that "the fixation on gay priests" as the cause of the sex scandal "is part of a long litany of simplistic, wrong-headed solutions and scape-goating," by the Catholic hierarchy.

"Sadly, many Catholics have already reached that conclusion though, due to the bishops' spin," Clohessy said. "The real issue continues to be the bishops' bad behavior."

By DANIEL BURKE
Copyright 2009 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.