By Paul Badde
The true center of
the universal Church is no longer Rome, as Pope Francis never tires of
underscoring, but the outlands. And here we are, on the outskirts, in
Manoppello!
A few weeks ago,
Father Antonio Gentili asked me to say a few words about the latest
transformations of the veneration of the Holy Sudarium of Christ in Manoppello.
I will gladly satisfy this request, also because I have already written a small
book on this subject in 2017, which contains some beautiful photos.
However, since I can only
speak with difficulty and I have almost completely lost what little Italian I
once learned, Father Antonio has allowed me to ask one of his confreres to read
the text. Thank you very much for that.
I will limit myself to
eight brief points, so that you can count them off before you become restless as
you listen.
I: The
reconstruction of the church of San Michele in 1923.
The most important
turning point for the rediscovery of the Holy Sudarium and its veneration all
over the world was the earthquake of Avezzano on January 5, 2015 in the middle
of World wWar I.
Until then, the Holy Sudarium
of Christ had been kept first in a storage room at the right of the High Altar
of the church of San Michele Arcangelo, here on the hill of Tarigni, just outside
of Manoppello and contemplated by the Capuchin friars privately, then from 1686, hidden all year round, it was placed in a safe in the right side chapel.
The safe resembled a
tabernacle and its door could only be opened with three keys held by the
Guardian of the Capuchins, the parish priest of San Nicola and the mayor of
Manoppello. So only all three together could open the door to the safe in order
to withdraw the reliquary with the Holy Sudarium and show it to the citizens of
Manoppello and all the pilgrims during two processions a year. Starting from
the end of the seventeenth century, the Holy Veil was shown during a first Feast
that took place on August 6, the day of the Transfiguration of Christ and -
from 1712 - during a second Feast, the third Sunday of May and the following day,
Monday. For the rest of the year, the original icon of Christ present here since
1638, simply remained hidden, if we are to rely on the information provided by
a copper plate behind the altar.
This means that for
at least 277 years here the sacred veil remained hidden like the dark painting
of a purported "Holy Face" in Tagliacozzo or the "Sacred
Corporal" in Orvieto.
Initially, the
earthquake of 1915 did not change things. This catastrophe occurred in the
middle of the First World War and the damage to the church of San Michele here
in Manoppello could not be repaired immediately.
It was only in 1923 that
Father Roberto da Manoppello, then guardian of the Friary of the Holy Face, had
the entire church of San Michele rebuilt.
During this
reconstruction, he had the Holy Sudarium transferred, forever, from the locked
safe of the side chapel to a new glass and marble display case, above the main
altar, where we still see it today.
Since then, pilgrims
have been able to see the Holy Veil of Christ above the tabernacle from up
close and freely, as had never been possible before in 1,890 years, neither in
Rome, nor in Constantinople, nor in Edessa!
In addition, the way
of seeing the holy image has once again been greatly changed by the
electrification of the shrine and the possibility of illuminating the holy
image from both front and back, which has almost revolutionized this
exhibition.
In fact, the key to
perceiving the Holy Face of the Lord in his Sudarium is the Light. In fact Jesus”,
as we read in the Gospel of John (Jn
8:12), said of himself: "I am the Light of the world.
This was an
unprecedented novelty: this immediate closeness of pilgrims to the Most Holy Sudarium.
Never before and nowhere
else, had the face of Christ from the empty tomb of Jerusalem come so close to
the common people! This viewing, as today in Manoppello, had previously been
reserved only for the high priests and emperors of Byzantium, but without this
light.
This unprecedented
privilege did not make it any easier for many to believe that the holy veil was
the same cloth (or "soudarion") that was laid on the Face of the Lord
in Christ's tomb in Jerusalem, as John expressly records in his Gospel.
Think about it! Since
the time of Pope Urban VIII (1623 - 1644), the copy of the Holy Sudarium in the
Vatican has been shown to the faithful only once a year, on Passion Sunday, for a few seconds,from the loggia of the
Veronica pillar about 20 meters high! Here in Manoppello, on the other hand,
pilgrims can see from up close the real Sudarium for 4,015 hours a year.
II: The Discovery
of the Identity of the Holy Face with the Sudarium of the Lord.
This brings me to the
second point in my report.
This identity of the
Holy Face with the Hagion Soudarion was first discovered by the Capuchin Father
Domenico da Cese (1905-1978) in 1965, when he was transferred by his Provincial
to the Capuchin Friary of Manoppello and from that time he spent countless
hours in prayerful contemplation before the Holy Face - day and night, as many
witnesses know. During this contemplation, he came to the conclusion that this
veil could only be the cloth first mentioned by John the Evangelist in his
Passover Gospel. It was the second cloth in the tomb of which John spoke. It could not be anything else!
Also coming to Father
Domenico’s aid was Father Gaudenzio, the legendary guardian of the shrine at
the time who, in the 1960’s, had the old church of the pilgrims dating from the
seventeenth century completely rebuilt. He extended the church fifteen meters
and had constructed in front of the simple building in honor of the Holy Face,
the spectacular large façade in imitation of the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio
in L’Aquila, which had been founded by Pietro di Morrone. It is the famous
funerary cathedral of the future Pope Celestine V, built in 1294.
Before Father
Domenico’s time, the people of Manoppello had believed and considered true that
an angel had brought the enigmatic cloth of the Sacred Sudarium to the foot of
the Maiella, in Manoppello, in 1506. This fact
was somehow easier to believe than to suppose that the veil came from the tomb of Christ
(although, according to Professor Pfeiffer, the first report regarding the angel by Father
Donato da Bomba in 1645 probably served above all to make the Holy Face immune
from any papal requests from Rome for restitution).
And we owe to Father
Domenico da Cese a second important intuition, which became essential for the
knowledge of this second delicate shroud. Because it was said: if we can
recognize the true image of Christ on this veil, of which there is only one
other authentic image on earth, namely the Shroud of Turin, then - as according
to a mathematical theorem - the face on the Shroud of Turin should also
correspond to the face on the veil of the Holy Face.
On September 12,
1978, he then made the pilgrimage of 835 kilometers from Manoppello to Turin to
see with his own eyes, as soon as possible in his life, the large and famous
other shroud, which was exhibited there for the first time in 45 years. The
next morning he headed to the Basilica of St. John, where at about 11am he
stopped in shock before the "shadow of the lamb who was slain ", with
the majestic face of the dead Son of God.
Of course, Father
Domenico was not surprised that it was identical to the face of Manoppello, which
was so familiar to him.
But on the very
evening of that September 13 he was struck and mortally injured by a Fiat 500
in front of his hostel in Turin. The newspapers that reported his death already
called him at the time "Father Soothsayer".
The identity of the
Lord depicted on both shrouds, which had become so evident to Father Domenico during
his life, was then finally witnessed to and sealed in Turin by his death.
It was the Lord
himself whom he had recognized on both shouds and it was the same Lord on these
two first icons that could not have been created by human hands.
III: The
miraculous first spread of this news.
And it is a part of
the miracles of Father Domenico’s life that Renzo Allegri, a famous journalist,
visited the shrine of Manoppello in the very days when Father Domenico lay
dying in Turin and had Father Luciano Antonelli, successor of Father Gaudenzio
as guardian of the Friary, tell him everything that Father Domenico had
confided to him regarding the Holy Face.
Only twelve days
after the funeral of Father Domenico, therefore, in the September 30, 1978,
edition of the Milanese weekly GENTE there appeared throughout Italy for the
first time a three-page article in which almost all the essential facts that we
can say even today regarding the Holy Face was already written.
"This veil is the sudarium, first recorded by the Evangelist John in his account of Christ’s resurrection from the dead".
 |
| Article by Renzo Allegri in Gente Magazine of September 30, 1978 with photo of Fr. Luciano Antonelli and the Holy Face |
On October 21, the
same article had already appeared in the November issue of the Swiss magazine
DAS ZEICHEN MARIENS, which Sister Blandina Paschalis Schlömer had the
opportunity to read a few weeks later in her Trappistine Convent of Maria
Frieden in Eifel, Germany, and who
shortly afterwards committed herself body and soul to spreading this good news
in the Catholic Church.
IV: The discovery
of the identity of the Holy Shroud with the Veil of Veronica in Rome.
First, however,
Sister Blandina informed the main researchers of the Shroud of Turin of the
Jesuit Order, including the art historian Professor Father Heinrich Pfeiffer,
of the Gregorian University of Rome. He visited Manoppello eight years later.
There, during his
first visit in the autumn of 1986, he immediately realized that the Holy Face
had to be identical with the lost, so-called, Veil of Veronica. This was once
the most precious treasure of the popes, for which Pope Julius II laid the
foundation stone of the new St. Peter's Basilica in Rome on April 18, 1506, as
the base for the so-called Veronica Column.
This column had been
built by Donato Bramante from the start as a huge safe for the holy veil and is
one of the four columns that still support Michelangelo’s dome of St. Peter's.
Obviously, the whole new edifice of St. Peter’s was destined to become a
monstrance of the Holy Face at that time, just as the cathedral of Orvieto had
become a monstrance of the Holy Corporal 300 years earlier.
This discovery of
Father Pfeiffer, that the famous Veil of
Veronica had not disappeared, but that still existed, though no
longer in Rome, but instead in a Capuchin church on a hill in Abruzzo,
caused a sensation. And he opened a new chapter in the history of the Holy Face
in 1999 when he made the news public at a press conference at the Press Office
in Rome.
V: Pope Benedict
XVI kneels before the Holy Sudarium.
It is therefore not
surprising that Pope Benedict XVI took perhaps the most important step of his time
in office when he visited the Holy Face on
September 1, 2006, on the first elective journey of his pontificate at
the invitation of Archbishop Bruno Forte.
No one should be
surprised. The new German Pope had been accompanied by images of the Holy Sudarium
from the beginning of his priestly life. A large image of the veil adorned the
façade of the Church of the Holy Blood in Munich, where he held his first post
as chaplain after his ordination in 1951.
And when he was later
a professor in Bonn, he celebrated Mass every morning in the Chapel of St. John
of Bonn Cathedral, where he always had to look at a Gothic fresco of the Holy
Sudarium.
But for the
veneration of the Holy Sudarium in Manoppello, his visit was the most important
step of all. It was an irreversible "point of no return".
After 479 years, it
was the first time that a successor of the Apostle Peter had knelt again before
the Sudarium of Christ.
The same evening, the
images of this event had already spread all over the world!
VI. Spread from
parish church to universal church.
Even a certain Daisy
Neves saw the images in Seattle, in the US state of Washington, south of
Vancouver in Canada. She was a pious widow of Filipino origin who had inherited
a considerable fortune from her husband.
She was also a passionate pilgrim. Then, in October 2006, when she read
an article in the American magazine "Inside the Vatican" about the
Pope's visit to Manoppello, she procured everything that had appeared in
English in America up to that moment on the Holy Face, which she had never
heard of before, and planned her first pilgrimage to Manoppello for Easter 2011.
 |
| Daisy and son Erwin with Fr. Carmine Cucinelli, Sr. Petra-Maria Steiner, Sr. Blandina Schlomer in Rome, October 2018 |
Here she was inflamed
by love for the true face, as she later said, and was overwhelmed by the dream
of not resting until the Holy Face found a home "in every parish church of
the universal Catholic Church." To this end she later committed her
fortune, her health and illness, and her life until her death, which took place in March 2019.
So she invited Father
Carmine Cucinelli to make a missionary journey to America for the year 2014,
and again for a similar tour of the world in Canada, the U.S.A. and the
Philippines for the year 2015, where she "enthroned" in various
churches the tactile relic of a silk veil with an imprint of the Holy Face in
scale. It was a triumph.
VII: In the
footsteps of Pope Innocent III of 1208. A rediscovery.
"But why", asked Father Carmine Cucinelli after the last
trip to Rome on November 25, 2015, "should there be 'enthronements' of the
Holy Face today only in America and Asia, but not in Italy and Rome, where the
relic itself has had its seat for centuries?" In the Treasury of St.
Peter's Basilica, where he was marveling in front of the ancient frame of the Holy
Face, from the holy year of 1350, he decided to go with Father Vincenzo, one of
his Capuchin confreres, to the nearby
church of Santo Spirito in Sassia to inquire about the possibility of a
presentation of the Holy Face in Rome.
There were just a few
days left before the beginning of the "Year of Mercy", which Pope
Francis had proclaimed for the Catholic Church on April 11, 2015 with the bull "Misericordiae
Vultus" (The Face of Mercy) for the period from December 8 to November 30,
2016, on the model of the first Holy Year proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII.
(1294 - 1303) more than seven centuries earlier, in the year 1300.
So Father Carmine
went with Father Vincenzo to Father Jozef Bart, the rector of the old church of
the historic hospital, who immediately consented to a solemn mass with a copy
of the Holy Sudarium in his church.
And one cannot
understand, except as a plan of Divine Providence, the fact that Fr. Jozef was
immediately willing to provide January 16, 2016 as the date for this temporary
enthronement!
But that was Omnis Terra
Sunday! It was the very day that Pope Innocent III had made known for the first
time the Holy Sudarium in the Latin Church of the West in January 1208 with a
procession with the same Sudarium from St. Peter’s to Santo Spirito in Sassia.
It was a great
celebration in Rome, with archbishops Georg Gänswein, Prefect of the Pontifical
Household and secretary of Pope Benedict XVI, and Archbishop Edmondo Farhat of Lebanon.
The choir of the Basilica of the Holy
Face, directed by the Maestro Nicola Costantini,
the Confraternity of the Holy Face and many citizens of Manoppello, made a solemn
pilgrimage from Saint Peter’s to Santo
Spirito in Sassia with a copy of the Holy Face, placed in an ancient original processional
frame, accompanied by songs and prayers.
 |
| Archbishop Georg Gänswein |
VIII: The blessing
with the true face of Christ. A third feast for the Most Holy Sudarium: OMNIS
TERRA.
And it was the birth
of the introduction of a new and third feast for the Holy Sudarium in
Manoppello by Fathers Carmine Cucinelli and Paolo Palombrini, where now every
second Sunday after the feast of the Epiphany of Christ in January, in memory
of the first announcement of the true face of Christ by Pope Innocent VIII,
there is a small procession with the Holy Face in the plaza in front of the
Basilica with a solemn blessing.
And since then this celebration
is always done with the participation of invited guests of honor, who at the end of the procession bless
the city of Manoppello and the whole world with the most holy and precious relic of
Christianity.
Here too, we must
imagine what enormous progress there is compared to September 2006, when Pope
Benedict was still standing like a simple pilgrim in front of the open display case
and praying, and when no one dared to ask him to bless the world with the Most
Holy Sudarium.
Here in Manoppello,
however, this new blessing with the precious relic in the universal Church, has
become a tradition, since Mons. Amerigo Ciani, one of the canons of St. Peter's
in Rome, carried out the blessing for the first time in January 2017. Then in the following years Cardinal Antonio Tagle of Manila,
Cardinal Ludwig Müller together with archbishops Bruno Forte of Chieti and
Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, after them Cardinal Kurt Koch and this
year again Archbishop Gänswein, who exclaimed here last January under the Holy
Face with the evangelist John: "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the
sins of the world."
 |
| St. Francis Venerating the Holy Face |
This is the situation today, where the following tasks await the brothers in Manoppello.
This above all: never
again think too little about this precious relic of Christianity.
There was the
resurrection of Christ from the dead and yes, there are truly two material
witnesses of that resurrection. There are the "angelicos testes, sudarium
et vestes", as the tenth-century hymn "Victimae Paschali Laudes"
says.
These are two angelic
or seraphic testimonies, (i.e. the "Testes"), namely the
Holy Shroud which is venerated in Turin, and the Most Holy Sudarium which was entrusted to the Seraphic Order here on the
hill of Tarigni.
It is a miracle and
the most moving testimony of the greatest miracle of all—the incarnation of God
in Jesus Christ.
And
there is no reasonable alternative to the good of believing that this veil
recorded the first breath of the risen Lord at his resurrection from the dead -
and the first glance of the Mother of God at the assumption of her deceased
body into heaven, as Dr. Weisbrod of Germany recently discovered in an ancient
text of Georgia.
Of course, all this
is incredible, but no more incredible than the presence of God in the transformed
host. - So no one should be surprised at all the resistance that this delicate
veil continues to encounter.
At
the feast of the Omnis Terra in 1208, the Holy Face was made known to Western
Christianity in Rome by Pope Innocent VIII, although not yet with the knowledge
we have today, thanks to the preliminary work of Father Roberto da Manoppello,
Domenico da Cese, Father Gaudenzio, Father Germano Di Pietro, Father Carmine
Cucinelli and Father Paolo Palombrini.
So now, for the 3rd
millennium, the Good News of this pictorial document wants to continue to be
made known every year more to the WHOLE WORLD by the Seraphic Brothers of
Manoppello. It's an incredible privilege. But now - as with Pope Benedict on
September 1, 2006 - the new image media help to bring this true image of light
all over the world, showing that face in which Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321)
already recognized at the culmination and at the conclusion of his "Divine
Comedy" that "face of love" that moves "the sun and all the
other stars".
