The Holy Face of Manoppello (L) with direct sunlight from behind the image, and (R) with direct sunlight in front, Jan 10, 2014. Credit: Alan Holdren/CNA.
Posted on 01/27/2014 8:06:10 AM PST by NYer
.- The Shrine to the Holy Face of Christ tucked into Italy's Appennine mountains is starting to catch the attention of the world, particularly that of American Catholics.
“We have a lot of Italians, of course, and many Germans but now we're seeing more and more pilgrims from the U.S.,” said Sister Blandina Paschalis Schloemer, a Trappist nun and daily pilgrim that lives within eye-shot of the shrine.
The modest basilica there houses a curious image of the face of Jesus Christ. Depending on the light, it is at times visible and at others transparent.
Sr. Paschalis Schloemer herself proved that the face is exactly proportionate to that on the Shroud of Turin, but whereas in the Shroud Christ’s eyes are closed here they are open.
Some believe it is the storied “veil of Veronica,” the cloth Veronica used to dry Christ's face as he carried the cross to his crucifixion. Others say it is the “resurrection cloth,” a “sudarium” that covered Christ’s face in the tomb. Still others take it as a centuries-old hoax.
What is certain is that none of them can prove how the image – which is present on a fine mussel-silk cloth without the use of any pigments – was created.
Paul Badde, the German author of “The Face of God,” is convinced that it is the one and only “Holy Sudarium,” the “napkin” from Christ's sepulchre that Saint John refers to in his gospel. In revealing Christ’s face at the moment of the Resurrection, he calls it “the first and authentic page of all the gospels.”
Badde’s book is the story of how he reached that conclusion. When it was published, he sent the first copy to then-Pope Benedict XVI in the autumn of 2005. The German Pope subsequently dedicated his first trip to the shrine.
Badde said that interest in the “Santo Volto” has been gradually increasing ever since.
“Benedict XVI's visit there set a point of no return,” he told CNA. “In 10 years time we may hardly recognize the place.”
He said that Americans are playing a “key role” among the pilgrims in a place that “had never been heard of” until the 2006 visit. The Chinese are also discovering the Holy Face, and buses filled with pilgrims from Brazil and Argentina are pulling through.
Just last weekend, Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston offered an introduction to an exhibit on the “holy face” unveiled in New York City. While the Capuchin cardinal avoided taking sides on the debate of the image’s provenance, he did allude to the strength of such depictions.
“Images of Christ have the power to move our hearts, they can catechize without words and allow us to contemplate the beautiful face of God revealed in His own Son,” Cardinal O'Malley says in his introduction.
In Manoppello, the shrine is run by Cardinal O'Malley's own Capuchin brothers. And, the increasing international popularity isn't lost on them. The latest edition of the Manoppellan friars' 50-page color magazine dedicates the leading article to an Italian-language re-print of Cardinal O'Malley’s presentation at the New York “Encounter” event.
Later in the publication, U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, who heads the Vatican's top court, is photographed as he celebrates Mass before the veil.
Pilgrims in recent months include another Vatican cardinal, world bishops, ambassadors from Germany and Costa Rica to the Holy See and even the American Catholic broadcaster EWTN's European regional director.
For Sr. Paschalis Schloemer, it’s no surprise that interest is increasing. She says it’s the real deal.
“Here, he says, 'For you I am here.' He is always here and he is waiting for us and for every human being.
“When we open our hearts, he can manifest himself,” she said. “He can show himself and speak to us.”
Pope Benedict XVI’s September 2006 visit to an Italian monastery has drawn increasing public attention to a small piece of cloth kept there which contains an image many believe to be the face of Jesus (see photo). The cloth has been compared to the Turin Shroud, because of the extraordinary similarities between the two images and the inexplicable nature of the images themselves.
According to Christian tradition, a woman named Veronica wiped Jesus’ face as he walked on the road to Calvary, and an image of Jesus’ face was impressed onto the cloth. Other reports say the name comes from ‘vera icona’ or true icon. Documents dating back to the fourth century refer to the existence of such a cloth, referred to as Veronica’s Veil, which reportedly had miraculous and healing properties. It was mentioned in Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy, written between 1306 and 1321, and was publicly displayed for Christian pilgrims in the Vatican Chapel from the 12th century until 1608. In that year, when the Chapel was being re-built, the cloth went missing, believed stolen. A short time later, records show that a cloth thought to be Veronica’s Veil was given to the monks at a monastery in Manoppello, a small town about 150 miles from Rome, where it has resided until now. However, the Vatican maintains that it still holds the original veil.
In 1977, Italian scientists examining the Manoppello veil under ultraviolet light found that the fibres contained no pigment, and concluded that the image of a man’s face on the cloth could not have been painted or woven with coloured fibres. In 1999, a German priest and scholar, Father Heinrich Pfeiffer, announced that, after 13 years of research, he concluded that the cloth in Manoppello was the authentic veil of Veronica. The cloth, measuring 9.5 by 6.5 inches, and made from byssus, a very fine fabric woven from mussel fibres, possesses a number of extraordinary properties: the image on the cloth appears or disappears depending on the angle of the light; the image appears to be three-dimensional when viewed from a certain distance and angle; and the identical image appears on both sides of the cloth, like a photographic slide, which would not have been possible to achieve using ancient techniques. Scientific research comparing the facial image on the Turin Shroud with that on the veil in Manoppello shows that they are exactly the same size and superimposable.
The only differences between the two images are that on the Shroud the wounds visible on the face are still open, while on the cloth of Manoppello the wounds have closed; and on the Manoppello cloth the mouth and eyes are open, while on the Shroud they are closed. The researchers who studied the two images concluded that the face in both images is the same, ‘photographed’ at two different moments.
The clarity of the image, supposedly more than 2,000 years old, surprises visitors to the shrine. Italian pilgrim Silvana Fiorelli said that the image filled her with a sense of “wonder: “I can’t explain how the face of Christ remained so visible after all this time,” she said.
Friar Emiliano, one of the sanctuary’s Capuchin guardians, called the Pope’s visit “an historical event”. The pontiff, he said, “like many pilgrims, comes not so much to see Christ’s face on Veronica’s Veil but to be seen by it, to be loved by the eyes of the Lord”. (Source: Reuters; Zenit News Agency, Rome; www.catholic-forum.com; Die Welt, Germany; Daily Telegraph, UK)
(Benjamin Creme’s Master confirms that the Veronica Veil at Manoppello is genuine.)
Of possible interest to your list, ping!
This can’t be true. All the modern day anthropologists tell us that Jesus had dark skin and kinky hair.
Is it because these particular anthropologists have dark skin and kinky hair?
At one point it MUST have been artistically “enhanced,” was it not? It doesn’t look photographic to me in the least, unlike the shroud of Turin, which is quite convincing at a glance. The eyes and hair especially look fake fake fake.
I agree. The shroud IS the face (body) of God. I don’t know about this one.
Perhaps you missed the following information that I posted above.
In 1977, Italian scientists examining the Manoppello veil under ultraviolet light found that the fibres contained no pigment, and concluded that the image of a man’s face on the cloth could not have been painted or woven with coloured fibres. In 1999, a German priest and scholar, Father Heinrich Pfeiffer, announced that, after 13 years of research, he concluded that the cloth in Manoppello was the authentic veil of Veronica. The cloth, measuring 9.5 by 6.5 inches, and made from byssus, a very fine fabric woven from mussel fibres, possesses a number of extraordinary properties: the image on the cloth appears or disappears depending on the angle of the light; the image appears to be three-dimensional when viewed from a certain distance and angle; and the identical image appears on both sides of the cloth, like a photographic slide, which would not have been possible to achieve using ancient techniques. Scientific research comparing the facial image on the Turin Shroud with that on the veil in Manoppello shows that they are exactly the same size and superimposable.
See my post #9.
Thank you for the post.
Thanks for the ping. This one looks more like a drawing than a photo.
Actually, NYer, as you know, I follow the science and the scholarship. And unfortunately for the Veil of Manoppello most of the above research is not correct. The Manoppello Veil research cited was hardly "scientific" in nature. Merely using an ultraviolet light examination through the glass panels to exclude pigments is not sufficiently scientific to conclude anything. As a matter of fact, later testing that DID remove the veil from the glass found distinct traces of pigments in the areas of the whites of the eyes and the teeth. . . which are actually lighter than the base material of the cloth.
The comparison of the Veil image to the Shroud image was done by a nun who accomplished her comparison by merely placing a publicly available photograph of the Shroud face behind the veil and noting a superficial match. Nothing more. In fact a more rigorous test, after making accurate scaling of the Shroud image to match accurate sizes, found NO MATCH. In fact, the mouth, nose, mustache (which on the veil is quite wispy compared to full on the Shroud), beard (forked and quite obvious on the Shroud compared to sparse and wispy on the veil), etc., were quite different. Any of us can replicate this today and see the lack if matching. . . unless one WANTs it to match. . . then one can make all kinds of rationalizations to make it match.
The claim that the image is identical on both sides is also false. . . which is actually strange because it should be identical. In fact, there are distinct differences between the front and obverse of the veil, including positions and number of the wispy hair strands on the forehead. These differences argue toward artifacting. . . the work of an artist.
Finally, the claim has been made that the cloth is byssus, the rarest cloth in the world, made from the cilia of a sea urchin. That's was thought so until it was actually examined truly scientifically and found to be cambric, a fine cotton woven by a technique developed in medieval France, and used for veils. . . and simply not available in the First Century while byssus was. Those who want this to be genuine always revert to the Veil being byssus, regardless of the fact that the cloth has been positively been identified as cambric, excluding it from having a first century provenance.
The Veil of Manoppello appeared 101 years after letters were exchanged between Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, more commonly known as Raphael, and Albrecht Dürer in which they discussed painting self portraits on both cambric and byssus copies of which which they sent each other. This veil bears a striking resemblance to a 22-26 year old Raphael, the ages of Raphael at the time the letters were written. In the letters, both Dürer and Raphael described the dual-sided nature and transparency of their efforts and the difficulty of making the back look right, the methods of keeping the pigments from showing, etc., and the difficulty of using byssus because it wouldn't take watercolor stains. Dürer noted that he had painted on byssus, but Raphael said that the high cost of byssus was beyond his means and chose cambric for his efforts. Several years ago, I researched this and posted the citations, quotations from the letters, and sample normal self portraits of Raphael showing his remarkable likeness to the Manoppello image. It took me weeks to do the research.
The Manoppello legend rests on a soldier's story of having stolen the real Sudarium from the Vatican and in remorse donating it to the church in Manoppello, but the Vatican states that their Sudarium is STILL in its reliquary and no attempt was ever made to steal it. I think the soldier acquired one of Raphael's cambric self portraits and concocted a story to explain what appeared to be a miraculous image. . . and it was believed. I actually think the real Sudarium is in Spain, in Oviedo. . . and that Veronica's Veil is a myth built around the display of the face of the Shroud without the body being shown when it was double folded in four, the tetra-diploid. Even the name Veronica is a distortion of the phrase Vera Icon, meaning true image, which tells me it's a teaching construct.
Their assumptions are based on modern occupants of the area and ignore the cometary census of males in the first century Jerusalem that found the average height was 5' 8 3/8", only 1/8" shorter than the average height of the average American male today. The Roman occupies of the average considerably shorter. Remember, that size was an average tallness. . . One or two sigmas on the bell curve allow for men to be considerably taller, over six feet. . . And, of course, shorter.
Even then, the Semitic people varied in appearance. There' said genotype called "high noble Arab." Tall, flowing hair, muscular. . . Think Omar Sharif. The percentage of the population mix is about 40% that match the type you describe.
Two images that differ.
Well, there is so much about the way what we call the supernatural can and does interact with what we call the natural. Can angels paint? Maybe they can. It could be all that the Shroud got was a symbolic representation of Christ. That we were denied any record of an actual likeness, lest we be tempted into idolizing it.
A custom created body also needn’t comply with its surrogate mother’s, for obvious reasons.
I’d think kind of homely, kind of runtish. “He had no stately form or majesty.”
One wonders sometimes what if this had happened in the era of photography, then we could get an accurate picture. Nobody even bothered to do a portrait, and the Shroud’s is iffy. We tend to see Jesus stark against the background and that’s not the historical case. The age was all agog for a Messiah and the desire was met with dozens of phonies. Jesus’ case wouldn’t have looked all that unusual to the worldly minded “New York Timeses” of the day.
PS: this facial image reminds me of portraits of the kindly Cesar Franck’s. Did Jesus look homely but kindly? I tend to think He did! It fits the bible narrative, and His character as expressed in the bible, quite nicely. Maybe this face is only symbolic of a real McCoy which has been lost to the mists of time, but it is a suitable face of a comforting Savior.
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The sizes of images are different to compensate for the closer cropping in Manoppello. I think, the proportion of chin to cheeks is wrong. The Manoppello face has weaker chin and more elongated cheeks and nose. There are other differences: the bridge of the nose is wider in Manoppello; the hair line seems receded; the mustache, the beard, and the eyebrows are thinner; the asymmetries of the face are very pronounced and different.
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