Turin

We started off the day in Turin with Mass at Our Lady Help of Christians Basilica.  This is the basilica designed and built by St. John Bosco.  It wasn't possible to take pictures of this beautiful church since there were Masses being said continuously.  Father Voigt offered Mass in the original chapel built by Dom Bosco as he opened the school for boys and then, based on his famous dreams of Our Lady and the heavenly mission imposed on him, he eventually built the Basilica.  Here is the original chapel prior to the beginning of our Mass.

City of Turin outside the Basilica hosting the Shroud.

I expected that we would probably wait for hours in line to see the Shroud.  It was a bright sunny day and around 73 degrees when we arrived after having a quick espresso and pastry at an outdoor cafe.  We reserved a viewing time a few months in advance and thus avoided a long queue of 'walk up' visitors.  Security for a couple of miles around was extremely tight. There were perhaps hundreds of officers and Italian Carabinieri in the immediate area.  Our wait in line was amazingly a little less than an hour.  It included at least one 'traffic light' (see picture below) and a well done short movie on closeups and details of each part of the shroud - no dialogue, just zoom-in and captions of the crown of thorns, chest wound, nail marks, and finally, "the face".

When we finally reached the shroud, it was displayed in the middle of the darkened Basilica in an upright display case and softly back-lit. Small groups were allowed in, a few people at a time, to stand before the shroud and meditate for perhaps 3 minutes.  A prayer was offered in Italian.

It is difficult to describe what it was like standing before the Shroud of Turin, called "La Sancta Sindone" in Italian.  In every artist's depiction of Our Risen Savior, He is gloriously clothed in white and rising from the sepulcher.  The gospel accounts tell us that the burial sheets were neatly folded and laid aside in the tomb. We hear these accounts every year at the variuos Masses of Easter Sunday.  And somehow, miraculously, here we are standing a few feet from the sheet spoken of in the gospel. And clinging to this sheet are traces of the very human precious blood and even muscle fragments of Our Lord.  And two thousand years later, He once again uses His Precious Blood to give us a faint glimpse of his very countenance in a temporal way on a woven sheet perhaps purchased by St. Mary and held and lovingly wrapped around the body of Our Lord by His Blessed Mother and St. John of the Cross.  It is hard not to get carried away in the sublimity of the moment and forget that at the very Mass we assisted at this morning, we felt, for the shortest time, the weight of His Precious Body against our tongue in the Blessed Sacrament.  Although still under the physical appearance of bread, it had in fact relinquished all of its properties of wheat and water and was truly His Body against our tongue.

All too soon, the guards were ushering us out of the viewing area so that the next group of pilgrims could have their time in front of the First Class Relic of our Savior.  I kept looking back until the Sindone was no longer visible. 


E sara gioia senza fine quando potremo contemplare il tuo volto glorioso. Amen.










The last treasure I was able to snap a picture of when leaving the Basilica was the side altar with the painting of the nursing Madonna.