(ANS - Turin) - Don Bosco twice contemplated the face of the Man of the Shroud along with the boys of his Oratory of Valdocco. The first time was for the wedding of Victor Emanuel II and Maria Adelaide in 1842. The second time was in 1868, for the exposition organized to commemorate the marriage of Umberto I and Margherita.

Fr Antonio Carriero, SDB, has written in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference: "The Salesians have inherited from their founder, this attention to the Shroud, to study its historical and scientific aspect. This was recognized, reluctantly, by Ulysse Chevalier, one of the historians opposed to the precious relic, when he said: 'The Salesians have become, despite my efforts to dissuade them, the promoters of the Shroud throughout the world'.

The first to write about it was a collaborator of Don Bosco, Fr Giulio Barberis, in 1898. In the first half of the twentieth century another Salesian, Fr Vincenzo Cimatti, brought devotion to the Shroud to Japan. This is apparent from the 'discovery' made by Fr Gaetano Compri, Director of the "Cimatti Museum" in Chofu (Tokyo). When consulting the archives of the Salesian house of Valsalice in Turin, he found a hundred letters written by Fr Cimatti to his ordination classmate Fr Antonio Tonelli, an expert on the Shroud.

In one of them he informed him that he had received some images of the Shroud that he had used when writing about it in a monthly magazine he had founded. The tradition lives on today through the work of another Salesian Fr Giuseppe Terzuolo who lives in Valsalice. He has set up a unique exhibition of studies on the Shroud done by Salesians.  Along with Raffaele Palma he has edited the ebook Sindone, le belle tracce. Affreschi sindonici in Piemonte e in Valle d’Aosta (The Shroud, the beautiful traces. Frescoes of the Shroud in Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta) (Editris2000).

"For the Christian people,” he says, “the Shroud means first of all devotion to the Passion of Jesus. I have gone all round Piedmont and I have found 150 paintings, prints and other pictures in which people of the remotest villages have expressed their devotion to the Shroud." When Fr Terzuolo hears people speaking about the image of the Shroud which some of them carry on their cell phone, he smiles, but only a little: "In this century, the image cannot be exempt from use in varied images. The Shroud is complete, even on smartphones, but it must be looked at and meditated in darkness and silence, especially from close up, even if it is only a virtual image".

Published 12/06/2015