It's Simple! …My Personal Take on the Shroud of Turin

“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.” (Matt. 11:25-26)

As Good Friday approaches, it would not surprise me if the controversy over the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin is raised once again. Here’s my take on it.

When it comes to believing Private Revelation in the lives of the Saints (including the Blesseds), I’m all in.

Having read so much vitriol in response to prior posts on this and related topics: please, if you do not believe in Private Revelation, please restrain your inclination to mock or to protest. There is no need for you to be offended. No one is asking or requiring you to believe in private revelation--not me, and certainly not the Church. What I am asking is that you respect my privilege to believe in Private Revelation as I respect your right to disbelieve in it. Thank you!

As a child, one of the first holy cards that I received showed the Holy Face of Jesus. I admit that aesthetically, the card was not one of my favorites; the Face was sketchy and monochromatic. (Truthfully, a little scary.) The information on the back of the card, which I couldn’t fully read or understand, told me that the image had something to do with a religious sister—which one or how so: that information totally escaped me. No matter. I knew it was an image of the Holy Face of Jesus, and so I treasured it.

That Holy Face image was familiar to me for a few decades before I ever heard of or saw the Shroud of Turin. But having grown up with that Holy Face image, so to speak, made it a no-brainer for me to accept the Shroud of Turin as the authentic burial cloth of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—as soon as I saw it!

How so? Simple. Because the Holy Face image on the prayer card that I had grown up seeing matched the Holy Face image that I saw on the Shroud of Turin! And no wonder! Because in doing some research about the connection between the two, I learned that Jesus and Mary had given to Blessed Maria Pierina (the Religious Sister to whom they had revealed and requested the Holy Face devotion) the exact same Holy Face image to appear on the Holy Face devotional medals that appears on the Shroud of Turin.

Now tell me. Seriously—do you think that Jesus and Mary would give the image of some made-up face or someone else’s face to Blessed Maria Pierina (beatified in 2010) to have as the image of Jesus’ Face featured on the Holy Face devotion?

I think not. So all the skeptics, cynics and sophisticated rationalists can argue, bicker, and deride all they want. For me, the Shroud is really the image of Jesus’ Sacred Body. For me, all the scientific evidence that I read that supports that belief is nice to have, but it is not necessary to my belief.

Call me naive, gullible, unscientific, whatever--no matter to me. I know what I know as a matter of simple childlike faith and common sense. The Lord of the Universe Who allowed a miraculous image of His Mother’s Blessed expectant body to be gifted to His Church in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe certainly could give His Bride, His Church, the image of His Crucified and Resurrected Body in the Shroud of Turin. Period.

Believe or disbelieve as you will. The Church has remained noncommittal on whether the Shroud of Turin is unequivocally the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. The Church has not made belief in the Shroud a matter of doctrine. However, the Church is the custodian of that Shroud, and the last three Holy Fathers have reverenced that Shroud, just in case that matters to your consideration of accepting the Shroud as a legitimate image for devotion.

(By the way, let us say that certain of the intelligentsia are correct—that the Shroud it is a phony, a hoax, a sham. So what--if it still conjures up in us a remembrance of and devotion to the sufferings of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?)

That being said, I for one will not permit the deriders to rob me of belief in the Shroud’s authenticity. Nothing they can say can deprive me of my childlike faith. What about you?

“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.” (Matt. 11:25-26)

Whether you believe or not in the Shroud of Turin, please believe that the Son of God shed His Blood on the Cross to save you and me. In this Mercy Jubilee let us thank Him and honor that great Sacrifice of pain and love, using whatever signs lead us to worship Him in His Passion and Glorious Resurrection.