Frankie, You said: The Catholic Church today is a corporation with the Pope its CEO. It is into just about every business that you can think of. It is a huge money making organization with tentacles all over the world and political influence as well. With all the billions that is the Catholic Church, one would think they may spend it on the worlds poor and needy but not on your life.
The Church and Catholics around the world are the greatest donators of time, money and people to the world's poor. Who do you think looks after the Aids victims in Africa? The poor of India? etc. Many of the hospitals built around the world, schools to teach the poor in many countries have been established by the Catholic Church.
With regard to the radioactive dating of the shroud, it was accepted by many people including church people. However, being a very old cloth it has been through many events that have resulted in running repairs. It is now thought that the samples taken, several very fine threads chosen so not to damage the image, were taken from one of those repair sites that occurred at about the time reported (medieval). Do not be surprised if those same three labs are asked to redo the tests on threads taken from a different part of the shroud.
The point of my posting the story was to show that we now have firm proof for an earlier identification of the shroud. It has always been accepted as surfacing in early 14th century but now it is early 13th century.
All I have wanted to talk about is the shroud but all you want to do is run down the Catholic Church by making wild claims. I think that is a bigoted response.
