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Don’t believe that I’ve ever said that the STURP scientists were/are incompetent.

Yes, you did... by painting with your broad brush.

Very little science involved in shroudism because the church holds the shroud so tightly. If the church wanted the truth, we’d probably already have the truth, but the church only lets certain, approved people have any access at certain, approved intervals.

You've painted with this brush before. Since 95% of the scientists who have had actual physical access to the Shroud are from STURP, your statements about incompetence and malevolence includes them... and you have never discriminated. Nor have you attempted to do so. You are backtracking now. Your ignorance of the science done on the Shroud shows through, glaringly.

The "shroud-holders" as you so call them, are the OWNERS of the Shroud... it is theirs to do with as they please. That is too bad for you... and us. I would do things differently. It's not my call.

Despite your assertions, the Shroud has been called—by people who know—the single most scientifically studied object in science history.

Yes, the C14 test samplers were both incompetent AND, for some of them, malevolent, at least so far as they had an anti-Christian or anti-Shroud agenda and ignored red-flags because the data they ignored would have lead them away from findings that tended to confirm their cherished and prejudiced non-belief. It was these who allowed their prejudices to lead them to fudge the data to "make it fit" their pre-conceived ideas when it lay outside what they expected!

And, hey, if the STURP scientists knew the sampling errors ruined their work, why didn’t they do or say something? Why release known-contaminated results?

The STURP scientists were deliberately excluded from the C14 panel because of politics. . . and only skeptics were allowed to participate. The STURP panel was considered by the new set to be hopelessly compromised because they had not concluded the Shroud to be a fraud based on the original science. Horrors. They made the wrong conclusion! Ergo, they were called pseudo-scientists and their work declared suspect, despite being peer-reviewed. It made it easy to ignore the protocols the STURP scientists had carefully prepared for any future C14 testing...

The STURP team DID raise many of the objections later, when they found what had actually been done. Before that, they assumed the scientists who had taken the C14 samples and performed the tests were competent, granting to them the professional courtesy they expected in return but obviously did not get. Even afterwards, they defended the tests themselves, showing that the tests accurately dated what was tested.

Unfortunately, the C14 test failed from the very beginning, at the first cut, because of a breakdown in protocol when the scientists allowed only one sample to be taken from only one area of the Shroud—an area that had been agreed to be avoided because it was observed by STURP to be both physically and chemically different than all other areas of the Shroud—instead of the agreed six to eight samples from six to eight areas including image and non-image areas in the original protocol.

Before you mouth off again about there being "very little science" done in "Shroudism", I suggest you might want to read some of the peer-reviewed scientific articles on the Shroud published in respected scientific journals, and those presented at symposia. You will find how wrong you are.

Why release known-contaminated results?

More ignorance on your part, Flowerplough. The C14 test was done in 1988. . . the proof that the sample was contaminated was discovered in 2004-2005. . . Do some reading and study before you make accusations.