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Wikipedia Text: The Shroud in the Catholic Church
The Shroud was given to the Pope by the House of Savoy in 1983. As with all relics of this kind, the Church has made no pronouncements claiming it is Christ's burial shroud, or that it is a forgery. The matter has been left to the personal decision of the Faithful. In the Church's view, whether the cloth is authentic or not has no bearing whatever on the validity of what Christ taught.
The late Pope John Paul II stated in 1998, "Since we're not dealing with a matter of faith, the church can't pronounce itself on such questions. It entrusts to scientists the tasks of continuing to investigate, to reach adequate answers to the questions connected to this shroud." He showed himself to be deeply moved by the image of the shroud, and arranged for public showings in 1998 and 2000.
As the image itself is a focus of meditation for many believers, even a definitive proof that the image does not date from the first century would likely not stem devotion to the object, which would then become something of an icon of the crucifixion. In any case, Catholics meditate on the events of the Passion, not on the object itself, "in immediate forgetfulness of the object", as St. John of the Cross put it. And in that sense any image of Christ's shroud has a universal meaning. Pope John Paul II called the Shroud of Turin "the icon of the suffering of the innocent of all times."
Some have suggested that if the identity of the Shroud with the Image of Edessa were to be definitively proven, the Church would have no moral right to retain it, and would then be compelled to return it to the Ecumenical Patriarch or some other Eastern Orthodox body, since if this was the case, it would have been stolen from the Orthodox at some time during the Crusades. Some Russian Orthodox consider that with the fall of Constantinople, the title of "emperor" passed on to Russia, so that they would have pre-eminent rights to the shroud over all the other Orthodox.
However, it should also be remembered that the Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Churches do not owe any allegiance to the Pope. In any case, the theft by conquest of the Image of Edessa by the Byzantine Emperor Romanus I in 944 arguably marks the first break in the legitimate chain of title anyway.
Because of the continuing dispute about its authenticity, some Catholic theologians have called the Shroud of Turin a sign of contradiction.
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