Veronica Veil found to be authentic
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.)
