Easter Homily on the Burial Cloths of the Lord

 The Solemnity of the Resurrection of the Lord

Mass During Easter Day

Dear brothers and sisters,

             There are, regrettably, a growing number of people throughout the western world who doubt the reality of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead. There are even a growing number of people who doubt even that Christ Jesus ever lived in our human flesh. Perhaps you know one of these persons; perhaps you are one of them yourself.

             In his homily for Good Friday in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, the Preacher to the Papal Household, Raniero Cardinal Cantalamessa – whose name literally means, “sing the Mass” – spoke to our “brother and sister atheists, agnostics, or those still searching for the truth (if any are listening).”[1] In his preaching, he quoted a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien, who said:

 

It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened,’ and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded all of him — so incapable of being ‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to be I am’ (John 8:58). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:9).[2]

 Why does the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings say it takes “a fantastic will to unbelief” to doubt the reality of life, death, and resurrection of Jesus? Leaving aside the various historical, philosophical, and theological arguments, we have another sort of argument, a tangible one.

             At Easter, we often speak of the “empty tomb,” but, in point of fact, the tomb was not empty on that first of the day week after the Crucifixion of the Messiah. We heard a moment ago the account of the tomb provided for us by the Evangelist Saint John.

            “So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb,” he says. He continues, saying, “They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bend down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in” (John 20:3-5). “The tomb was empty, then, inasmuch as nobody was there. It was not completely empty, however;” it contained the various cloths with which Jesus had been entombed.[3] The presence of the burial cloths inside the tomb is also attested to by Saint Luke (cf. Luke 24:12).

             He goes on to say something remarkable, something that is very often overlooked: “When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place” (John 20:6-7). We have, then, here mention of at least three cloths within the tomb: at least two on his body and a third that covered his face.

             But then Saint John says something even more striking: “Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed” (John 20:8). What did he see that caused him to believe? The tomb without the body of Jesus? Certainly not. No, he saw the burial cloths and believed. Why? What was so special about these cloths. You may be surprised to learn that the burial cloths of the Lord Jesus have not been lost to history; we are still in possession of four cloths that were found in the tomb of Christ.

             First, there is a long, thin strip of cloth that was wrapped around Jesus’ chin up to the top of his head to keep his mouth closed in death.

             Second, there is a bloodstained cloth measuring 33 inches by 21 inches called the Sudarium of Oviedo, because it is housed in Oviedo, Spain where it has been since at least the year a.d. 840. It was placed upon the face of Jesus at the moment he died to catch what is called the death blood that came out of his nose and mouth.

             Third, there is a long, rectangular cloth measuring 14 feet by three and a half feet that bears the image of a man who was five feet and eleven inches tall. The man depicted on this cloth was crucified, an image best seen in photographic negatives. Although this Shroud of Turin – so named because it is now kept in the Italian city of Turin - is the most studied cloth in the world, the image found on it cannot be explained.

             Whether considered individually or together, these three cloths cannot be what Saint Peter saw that caused him to believe in the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The first two cloths show nothing but blood and the shroud could not have been unrolled inside the tomb; even if it could have been, it would have been too dark inside to see the image. What, then, did he see? There is a fourth cloth, a hand cloth that had been placed over Jesus’ face, the one found not with the burial cloths, but rolled up in a separate place, because it was quite different the rest.

             This fourth cloth is called the Volto Santo – the Holy Face – and the Veil of Manoppello, because it is housed in the Italian village of Manoppello, where it has been since the sixteenth century. It was kept in Rome from 708 - where it was called the Veronica, the true image - until the sack of Rome by the German emperor until 1527. The cloth itself measures 17.5 centimeters by 24 centimeters and is the largest piece of byssus surviving from the ancient world. As if on the cloth, we see

 

…the face of Christ on a transparent veil in delicate byssus colors, framed by shoulder-length hair parted in the middle and a sparse beard. The left cheek is slightly swollen, the mouth slightly open, and the eyes are open in an expression that is not included in the vocabulary of arrest warrants: perfectly merciful.[4]

 It is the most priceless treasure in the world, the very image of the Face of God, and served as the basis on which artists depicted the Savior for almost fifteen hundred years, but that is a story for another day.

             Byssus, the material of which this veil, this napkin, this sweat cloth is made, is woven from the silk with which a particular mollusk attaches itself to rocks. Byssus cannot be dyed and it cannot be painted; its color only comes from the color of the silks taken from the mollusk. In the ancient world, it was a precious material, never sold but only given as a gift. Pharaohs were buried with a piece of it over their faces and wealthy women wore it as a veil because they could see out, but others could not see their faces through the cloth. Away from the light, byssus appears brown, dark, and opaque, but when held in the light byssus shimmers in golden hues and is transparent, so much so that you can read a newspapers through it. Byssus is photoactive; it responds to light, strange as this might seem. Today, there is only one woman in the world who knows how to weave byssus, Chiara Vigo, who lives on the island of Sardinia.

             What happened that first Easter morning when Saint Peter entered the tomb of Christ? The cloth placed on Jesus’ face was on the ground, but

 

…it was not lying there flat. It was a haze, but it must have been recognizable as a “thing,” as an “object” that caught the first rays of dawn. Naturally, Peter bent down and picked it up. It was the precious little cloth that had lain on Jesus’ face, the finest sea silk. It was a light as a feather as Peter picked it up, unfolded it and held it against the light of the entrance. What else? He must have held that way, not toward the interior of the dark chamber, but up to the light. It was, however, a cloth of light. It reacts to light.

 

What Peter saw now in the tomb on the veil against the morning light made it in a blink of the eye as clear as the sun: no one had taken the Lord from the tomb. Jesus had not been stolen and carried away. Something completely new was in the world now. It was unheard of it, what Peter glimpsed in the blue hours of the first Easter morning here, on that transparent fabric held against the light of the entrance. Here suddenly Christ looked back at him! With open eyes! No man had ever seen this before. This cloth was “not made by human hands,” as was said later. It was the true image. Three days earlier Peter has said that he did not know that man. Hours later he had had to watch from a distance and hear how Jesus, streaming with blood, cried out once again on the cross and died. Peter was still reeling from the shock – when now suddenly Christ himself looked out at him from the veil in his hand. Now he knew him. Now he recognized him immediately. “In thy light we see light,” Israel had read for centuries in the Book of Psalms [Ps 36:9]. Did that verse perhaps occur to him? Or did he already remember then the earlier intimations of Jesus that “the Son of man must … be killed, and on the third day be raised” [Lk 9:22]? We do not know. Only one thing do we know. Besides the bewildering emptiness of linens in the tomb, this message in pictures read: “I live.” Jesus was no longer dead. The only thing corresponding to this image was not another image, no icon or other sort of portrait; the only thing corresponding to what he saw there was the living man.[5]

 This cloth is what Peter saw that caused him to believe, but it was not only Peter who saw it.

             Mary, too, treasured this cloth with the image of the Face of her Son. We are told that

 

She had received it from the hands of God himself and kept it with her at all times, so that she might always be able to contemplate the wondrously fair face of her Son. Each time she wanted to adore her Son, she stretched the image out to the east and prayed before it with her gaze on her Son and with open, uplifted hands. Before the burden of her life was finally taken from her, the apostles carried Mary on a stretcher into a cave. In this cave, they laid Mary down to die before the face of her Son.[6]

 We see in this cloth that Jesus “does not limit himself merely to affirming his love, but makes it visible and tangible. Love, after all, can never be just an abstraction.”[7] Those who look upon this Face cannot but believe.

             When examined forensically, the face on the Shroud of Turin and the face on the Veil of Manoppello belong to the same man, and the blood stains on the Veil of Oviedo belong to this same man.

             This Easter, dear friends, look upon the Face of Christ, the proof of his Resurrection from the dead. Look upon the Face of Mercy and believe! Amen. Alleluia!

---

[1] Raniero Cardinal Cantalamessa, Homily for Good Friday, 15 April 2022. Accessed 16 April 2022. Available at https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/250993/full-text-cardinal-cantalamessa-s-homily-at-the-vatican-s-good-friday-2022-liturgy.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter __________. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (), .

[3] Paul Badde, The True Icon: From the Shroud of Turin to the Veil of Manoppello. Trans. Michal J. Miller. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 33.

[4] Paul Badde, ibid., 65.

[5] Ibid., 92-93.

[6] In ibid., 49.

[7] Pope Francis, Vultus misericordiae, 9.

A veil in the margins

As is well known, one's Twitter feed can be filled with much that is ugly in this world, but what is less well known is that one's Twitter feed can also be filled with much that is beautiful in this world. This is why I follow, among others, a number of medievalists who tweet out images from some of the great manuscripts. Among these is Kathleen McCallum, who enjoys "life in the margins" and tweets images of what are known marginalia, images found in the margins of medieval texts.

Yesterday, she tweeted a beautiful image of the legendary Saint Veronica holding her famous veil, which, as Paul Badde has shown, is in reality what is now called the Veil of Manoppello, the Volto Santo, the cloth that covered Jesus' face in the tomb (cf. John 20:6-7):

Detail, Yates Thompson MS 27 f. 44

The image comes from what is called the Hours of Yolande of Flanders, made somewhere between 1353 and 1363 and now housed in the British Library. The image is found in the left margin of a page principally depicting the Visitation, which you can view here.

If you look closely at the veil held in the hands of Saint Veronica, you can see the face of Jesus bears a rather striking resemblance to the face of the Veil of Manoppello, the Holy Face:

If you compare these two images to the image of Saint Veronica as depicted in your parish church's Stations of the Cross, the face on her veil will more likely show Jesus' eyes and mouth as both closed, which is not what we see in the above images. In fact, in nearly every depiction of the Veil of Veronica before 1527, the eyes and mouth of Jesus are shown to be open because the artists clearly used the Veil of Manoppello as their model. After 1527, when the Volto Santo was taken from Rome during the sack by the German emperor to Manoppello, artists began to use the image of the Shroud of Turin as their model for the face of Jesus, hence the eyes and mouth of Jesus began to be depicted as closed in artistic renderings of Saint Veronica. Every now and again you'll find an image of her veil made after 1527 that shows Jesus' eyes and mouth as open, a sign the artist knew something of the Volto Santo.

The desire of prophets and kings

The Lord Jesus says to his disciples today, "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it" (Luke 10:23-24). What was it these prophets and kings desired to see and hear?

The Prophet Isaiah said, "I will wait for the LORD, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him" (Isaiah 8:17). King David prayed, "Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your merciful love" (Psalm 31:16)! The prophets and kings, then, longed to look upon the face of God and to hear his voice.

This desire to look upon God's face runs like a thread through all of the texts of the Bible, in both the Old and the New Testaments. After Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, a group of Greeks approached the Apostle Saint Philip and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus" (John 12:21). Does not this same desire reside deep within our hearts, as well? Do we not also wish to see Jesus, to look upon what kings and prophets desired to see?

We know that this desire will be granted to us with the Second Coming of Christ Jesus, which we now await with eager expectation in these days of Advent. Saint Paul says, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (I Corinthians 13:12). The Apostle Saint John says, "they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads" (Revelation 22:4).

With the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Lord God has indeed revealed his Face to us in Jesus the Christ. This is why Jesus said to  Saint Philip, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). The ancient desire of prophets and kings to see the face of God has been granted in the Son of God and of Mary.

What is more, the Lord Jesus has left us a foretaste of the Beatific Vision of his Holy Face on a piece of byssus, once housed in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome and now housed in the Basilica of the Holy Face in Manoppello:

This Face is the desire of prophets and kings. Knowing that this Face is our deep desire, as well, the Lord, in his merciful love, he has left an image of his Face for us, to gaze upon, to marvel at, and to ponder until he comes again in his glory with his angels (cf. Matthew 25:31). It is this veil that the Apostle Saint Peter found in the tomb (cf. John 20:6-7). When he looked upon this handkerchief, Saint John "saw and believed" in the Resurrection of the Lord (John 20:8).

Let us, then, in these days of Advent, cry out to the Lord with the words of the hymn, "O Come, Divine Messiah":

Dear Savior, haste!Come, come to earth.Dispel the night and show your face,and bid us hail the dawn of grace.

O come, divine Messiah;the world in silence waits the daywhen hope shall sing its triumphand sadness flee away.

May the Lord come quickly. May he not delay. May he grant us the full vision of the beauty of his Face!

Cardinal Koch: "It is a wonderful event to be in front of the Face of Christ"

Earlier this morning I mentioned the Italian text of a recent interview His Eminence Cardinal Koch granted to Paul Badde on the Volto Santo following a recent pilgrimage of seventy Orthodox Bishops who celebrated the Divine Liturgy at the Shrine of the Holy Face in Manoppello.

Paul has kindly given me permission to publish my translation of his interview here for you, which I give in full:

“We saw in the face the mercy of God”: A dialogue with Cardinal Koch

Paul Badde interviews the president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity on a special event

By Paul Badde

PHOTO: Paul Badde

(Manoppello, September 2016 / 9:15 a.m.) In 2017, it will be 500 years since in the West the Lutheran brothers and sisters began to separate themselves from the Pope and from the Roman Catholic Church. However, even older than the Reformation and the division of the Western Church is the Great Schism of the East, and the division of Christianity into the Church of the East and the Roman Catholic Church in the West, which occurred in 1054 between Rome and Constantinople. Only on December 7, 1965 Pope Paul VI from Rome and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras from Istanbul solemnly cancelled the reciprocal anathemas “from the memory and from the center of the Church” “abandoning them to oblivion.” But the Eastern Church and the Western Church remained estranged, above all from the cultural point of view. Now, however, at the invitation of Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto, on September 18, 2016, seventy Orthodox bishops celebrated the “Divine Liturgy” of Saint John Chrysostom under the Face of Christ, there exposed above the principal altar, together with two cardinals and numerous other prelates of the Roman Catholic Church in the Basilica of the Holy Face of Manoppello.

CNA: Lord Cardinal, Archbishop Bruno Forte calls the “Holy Face” of Christ “the polar star of Christianity.” For him, there is no reasonable cause to doubt that the image on the veil is the sudario of Christ that John cites in the Holy Sepulchre near the burial clothes. But is it not also a provocation for the Orthodox brothers?

Cardinal Koch: Christians believe in one God who showed his concrete face in Jesus Christ. When we know more closely the Face of Christ and when we more deeply identify ourselves with him, the more deeply we become one, as well. For this is a wonderful event to be in front of the Face of Christ, to pray, to venerate the Face, because it fulfills his [Christ’s] desire that we be one.

Catholics have something to bring to the Orthodox. Also for the Orthodox it is so, as for instance for their culture of the veneration of icons. Could it be that from this day forward also in the Catholic Church the images can come to be understood and evaluated in a new way – in the midst of that mighty “Iconic Turn” that the experts of communication today note, in which the images expect a general role in communications like never before?

Yes, the very profound mystery of ecumenism is an exchange of gifts. Today the Church has her gifts. And a particular gift the Orthodox have are the icons. So I think that also many Christians in the West can find a new access to the icons and thus deepening the faith. It is a great gift. It is very important that we also re-evaluate the images in the Western tradition. With the Reform of the sixteenth century, we have placed a whole new accent on the word. But the Word has become flesh, the Word became visible, so also the images belong to the faith. This is a gift from the Orthodox that we welcome gratefully.

At Chieti, in these recent days the delicate question of the theological and ecclesiological relations between primacy and synodality in the life of the Church, then the role of Peter and that of all bishops, was discussed within the commission that has come on pilgrimage to Manoppello. Ten years ago Peter came here in the vesture of Pope Benedict. Since then, there has been an enormous turning point in the evaluation of this image of Manoppello that has become famous throughout the world. What significance do you think will be given to this day of pilgrimage, in which the synod of bishops gathered here?

It is very beautiful that we could come here on this anniversary ten years later. Pope Benedict came in the name of the whole Catholic Church. Today is present here the Church of the East and of the West. So this anniversary maybe can also help in the search for the unity between the Church in the East and the Church in the West.

You, as president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, are responsible to Rome for ecumenism. In this regard, Pope Francis affirmed: “Look at Christ and go ahead with courage!” Which next step would indicate to you today to go with courage to encounter Christ, in a day in which notwithstanding the difference between the Eastern Church and the Western Church you have come together before this image?

In reality, we are always on the way towards Christ. Because it is his will that we find unity, it is not a human project. Christ himself on the eve of His Passion prayed that His disciples might be one, that the world might believe. The credibility of this testimony depends on the fact that we are one. This is also a particular request of Pope Francis, when he says that when we can walk on the same road toward Christ, then we find unity.

“Misericordiae Vultus”: with these first Latin words begins the Bull of Indiction with which Pope Francis announced this year of the Jubilee of Mercy. The “Face of Mercy” has given to this year a very particular meaning. What do you sense today being here before the merciful gaze of Jesus, who looks at us from this wonderful veil?

It is a magnificent message that we can have a merciful God, for which we know that there are no cases without hope. Per as long as a man can fall down, he can never fall lower than the hands of God. Now you can really see this face, encounter it, it is naturally a marvelous deepening of this message of the Holy Year. The men of today need nothing more than the mercy of God. And if they can look on the face of the merciful God it is a marvelous gift.

And what will you tell Pope Francis about this event in case you will have the opportunity?

I will certainly tell him that we saw in the Face his great message of the mercy of God. And that this Face is important for the whole Church. It is in a certain way the manifesto of the Church: the merciful face of God!

Orthodox Bishops celebrate the Divine Liturgy before the Volto Santo

Word of the Volto Santo - the veil that covered the face of Christ Jesus in the tomb and now bears the image of his face after his Resurrection - slowly continues to spread among the faithful as the desire to behold the face of God increases in the hearts of those who love him.

Today, nearly seventy bishops of the Latin and Orthodox Churches taking part in the fourteenth plenary session of the joint commission for theological dialogue between the Churches visited the Shrine of the Holy Face in Manoppello, Italy where the Divine Liturgy was celebrated before the Volto Santo:

PHOTO: Antonio Bini

I learned of the plans for this celebration some months ago and have anxiously been awaiting photographs and stories from the day's celebrations (which I hope to share with you as I receive them).

PHOTO: Antonio Bini

Antonio Bini, to whom I am grateful for many kindnesses over these past several months, reports that a representative of each of the fourteen Orthodox Churches prayed in ten languages before the Volto Santo. Afterward, they prayed the Our Father together in Italian.

Let us pray that the Lord Jesus will restore unity to his Church through a mutual desire to look upon his Holy Face!

The face of Jesus in art

If, like me, you are a fan of images from illuminated manuscripts, you might consider following @SexyCodicology on Twitter to see images like this one from a medieval Book of Hours:

Book of Hours of Daniel Rym, Deposition, Walters Manuscript W.166, fol. 117v

While the page is beautiful in many regards, what most caught my attention was the face of Jesus below the deposition scene:

This particular Book of Hours is from the early part of the fifteenth century, but I knew that simply by looking at the depiction of Jesus' face, which bears a striking resemblance to the Volto Santo of Manoppello:

It was only after the sudarium was brought to Manoppello from Rome after the sack in 1527 by the German emperor that the depiction of Jesus' face drifted rather remarkably from the face we see in this veil of byssus. This change is most clearly seen in depictions of the Veil of Veronica (which, in reality, is the Veil of Manoppello).

Prior to the sack of Rome in 1527, the face of Jesus is frequently depicted with open eyes, a slightly open mouth, and a slight tuft of hair at the center of the forehead; after the sack of 1527, his face is shown with closed eyes, a closed mouth, and the tuft of hair is gone. In fact, prior to 1527, the depiction of Jesus' face most closely resembles the Veil of Manoppello; after 1527, the depiction of Jesus' face most closely resembles the Shroud of Turin. The first shows Jesus risen from the dead; the second shows him dead.

If you keep your eyes open and look at the face of Jesus as depicted by artists, you can tell which cloth they attempted to copy. I prefer the ones that seek to copy the Veil of Manoppello.

Il Volto Santo magazine published in English for the first time

For the past one hundred and ten years, the Papal Basilica of the Sanctuary of the Holy Face has published a magazine to promote devotion to the Volto Santo, the Holy Face of Jesus present on a piece of byssus - a cloth made from the silk of mollusks - found by the Apostles Peter and John in the tomb of Christ Jesus (cf. John 20:6). This magazine has now been published in English for the first time.

Under the editorial hand of Mr. Antonio Bini, various articles, stories, and homilies from the past few years have been translated and included in the book titled, The Holy Face: From Manoppello to the World. I am happy to say the two homilies I translated by Archbishop George Ganswein and by Archbishop Edmond Y. Farhat are included in this volume.

On his excellent blog, The Holy Face of Manoppello, Raymond Frost has posted a link to the full text of this special volume. I encourage you to follow his blog for news and photographs of the Volto Santo and to read The Holy Face: From Manoppello to the World. It is hoped that additional English volumes will follow.

In his introduction to The Holy Face, Father Carmine Cucinelli, rector of the basilica, referred to those of us who contributed to the book as "witnesses and disseminators of the Holy Face." Please remember us - and, more importantly, our efforts to make the Holy Face more known - in your prayers.