Italian:
1946: l’arrivo della Sindone a Torino, giunta dall’Abbazia di Montevergine dove il Telo era custodito
#Sindone2015
English:
1946: the arrival of the Shroud in Turin from the Abbey of Montevergine where the shroud was kept
#Sindone2015
Picture Tweet of the Day
Wonderful. Look at the sense of anticipation.
Not quite Steven Spielberg (“Close Encounters “) but … close:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/–7IMYSKTDHI/VL4ep2HqHMI/AAAAAAAAEIA/gufRWXn7EFU/s1600/arrival%2Bof%2Bmothership.jpg
Is that a train in the background? Perhaps this is the arrival of the Shroud at Avellino Station, and it is being transferred into the car for the drive to the monastery.
Not Avellino. This was the arrival at the “Porta Nuova” station in Turin, 31 October 1946.
Ah yes, silly me. I got my “to”s and my “from”s confused!
What a wonderful historic picture! Unless some of the onlookers are plain clothes cops (which I doubt), there appears to be virtually no security visible. Today, the Shroud is encased in bullet-proof glass and is guarded around-the-clock 365 days of the year. How times have changed. Though it’s not readily discernible because it is covered, does anyone know if the Shroud is being transported in its silver, bejeweled reliquary in this picture? It appears to have similar dimensions (i.e. rectangular).
From 1939 al 1946, during the Second World War, the Holy Shroud was housed in he Sanctuary of Montevergine, in Avellino. For over 7 years the cloth was secretly stored below the altar of the chapel, where the Benedictine monks used to celebrate the Vespers.
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The most extraordinary Christian icon, until then had been kept in the chapel of the Royal Palace of Turin, was transported first to Rome where it was temporarily placed into the chapel “Guido Reni” of Quirinale, where resided the Savoy, a place that was not deemed safe …
Abbot Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone was summoned (by telegram of September 7) to the Secretary of State of the Vatican, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, who told him that the choice for the temporary storage of the Shroud had fallen on the Benedictine monastery of Irpinia, where 25 September 1939, surrounded by more jealous secrecy, the precious relic was transferred by car, with no apparent military escort. In the minutes of delivery signed by Abbot Marcone, by Canon Paul Brusa, guardian of the Holy Shroud, the prior of Montevergine, Bernardo Rabasca and the chaplain of the King, Joseph Gariglio, were contained all the provisions …
In an additional report was settled that, in the event of air strikes on Avellino, (as tragically occurred in September 14, 1943…) for greater precaution the abbot of Montevergine would cure to transport it in an even more secure: an artificial tunnel dug into the rock one hundred meters away from Coretto, which is accessed through the hall of the monastery, without the need to go outdoors.
The choice of the Montevergine sanctuary was a good one. One imagines that other such sites, such as the abbey of Monte Cassino, might have been chosen…
(>The Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, about 90 miles (150 kilometers) to the northwest, was heavily bombed by the Allies in 1944, and many Savoy family documents about the shroud that were placed there for safekeeping during the war were destroyed, Cardin said. …
link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/10/shroud-of-turin-going-bac_n_532856.html )
In 1946, after the war, before leaving for exile after the institutional referendum that sanctioned the Republican choice, King Umberto II June 10 with a letter instructing the Archbishop of Turin Maurilio Fossati to obtain the return of the relic to the city of Turin. The cardinal himself, as recounted in a letter written two days later, he came to Montevergine October 28 and, after checking the integrity of the seals, the ceremony ended with a charming stay in Irpinia of precious cloth.
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>The Holy Shroud was transferred from Turin during World War II to keep it out of reach of Adolph Hitler, according to a Benedictine priest in a southern Italian abbey. …
>The secret was kept throughout the war despite a search of the premises carried out by German soldiers in 1943 following a bombing of Avellino. The relic was protected, said Fr. Cardin, as, upon hearing of the coming of the soldiers, the monks retired to pray at the altar. “An officer,” he explained, “seeing them in prayer, gave the order not to disturb (them) and that was how the sacred relic went undiscovered.”
>Hitler apparently sought the linen for its “sacred power.”
Perhaps he was obsessed with the occult and with religious artifacts…
Link:
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/holy_shroud_hidden_from_hitlers_grasp_in_benedictine_abbey/
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Have you read the presentation by Skurka?
In that work there is a claim about “superparamagnetism” and
there is also the following phrase:
>The body image would lose its optical properties a result of the alignment being lost over time possibly just by moving the cloth through earth’s magnetic field such as when the cloth is being transported.
Now, in order to compare the images of the Shroud (before and after the transports), the question to solve can be the following:
Where we can find photographs of the shroud before and after the secret custody in Montevergine?
However … I do not think that the (hypothetical) differences indicated by Skurka can be detectable on those possible old images …
Piero quote: “The Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, about 90 miles (150 kilometers) to the northwest, was heavily bombed by the Allies in 1944, and many Savoy family documents about the shroud that were placed there for safekeeping during the war were destroyed, Cardin said.”
Very many NZ soldiers were involved in the Cassino campaign. The Allies’ northward advance up the Italian peninsula to Rome was still blocked by Kesselring’s Gustav Line, which was hinged on Monte Cassino. A mass landing to bypass Cassino, had occurred to the north at Anzio, but time spent in consolidating these forces allowed Kesselring’s reserves to develop a powerful counteroffensive, reducing this attack to a shallow beach-head.
The decision to bomb the historic Cassino monastery was a difficult one, was controversial, and not made lightly. I recall discussing the issue in the 1960s with a work colleague, a veteran of the Cassino campaign. He told me that it was plain the German army was occupying the monastery, and using it as an unassailable defence fortification. Vehicle wheel marks were clearly visible on the ground and appeared over several nights showing evidence of their troop movements, and eventually the decision to bomb was taken.
The comment that several Savoy family documents concerning the Shroud were destroyed is significant, and of course one wonders what they might have contained. I think it renders somewhat fatuous the demands of purist historians for documentation as proof for various assertions made, when it is plain that many such key documents have over the course of centuries been lost in vary many suchlike actions.
Dear daveb,
Thank you for your attention…
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Here what I have read today (here a long and rough translation. Sorry!):
>September 1939: six days after the German invasion of Poland, the sacred cloth according to the Christians has wrapped the body of Christ in the Sepulchre left Turin for the first time in almost four centuries. Destination, dark abbey avellinese: Montevergine. Officially, it was necessary to protect the only relic from the bombing, but the real fear was that he could throw another cross over its shadow: the Nazi swastika …
>Among the documents consulted showed a singular fact: Cardinal Fossati, Archbishop of Turin, had not even been informed of the start of the Holy Shroud in Turin on 7 September 1939. One possible reason may have been the need for the Cardinal, not knowing this, he could not talk even under torture. He would go to Montevergine, after the war, to bring the Holy Shroud in Turin after obtaining the consent of King Umberto II, now in exile for a few months: a consensus being essential property of the House of Savoy, the Shroud. In a letter dated June 10, 1946, just three days before departure for exile, Umberto II wrote to Cardinal Fossati: “The current events lead me today to tell Your Eminence that – while it is my understanding that the precious relic remains sacred and inalienable heritage of my house – do right now my full consent to that returns to its pristine placement in Turin, in the chapel which bears the name. ”
>In an exchange of ideas with the researcher and historian Lucan, Dr. Paul Tritto, revealed an interesting argument about a book by Giorgio Galli entitled “Hitler and magical Nazism.”
[Here my note = …B.T.W.: I have bought that book several years ago…]
>Tritto writes: “In the book of Galli you will find something on the relationship between the Nazis and the esoteric. Upon reading I thought credible reconstructions of Galli. Even today, I think largely valid, but Galli ends, perhaps unwittingly, to draw a picture which comes from outside the usual Hitler schizophrenic. Instead, I believe that Hitler had a vision too shiny to be conceived by the mind of a deranged. Sure, it was totally out of the normal. But I would not speak of schizophrenia; perhaps his was a diabolical design or even the result of a personality “possessed”. Perhaps it is a case of demonic possession. I do not think, therefore, that Hitler wanted to take possession of the Shroud for esoteric rites. In my opinion the Shroud had to represent for him the symbol of something, then had a meaning more realistic. I also cite another book “Conversations with Hitler” Hermann Rauschning. In a chapter called “the Antichrist” the author refers to private conversations in which Hitler had explicitly expressed the intention “of radically eradicate Christianity in Germany with all its roots and its branches.” But it is not a simple hostility to support this diabolical plan, there is rather the intention of usurping the place of the Catholic Church in its mission to redeem humanity. Rauschning reports that Hitler once said: “I want to reveal a secret. Foundations with an Order. “The goal, says Rauschning, was to transform the SS into a kind of caste of priests secrets. The same author also reports that one day a woman in his entourage gave Hitler a strange suggestion that seems to have influenced him; she advised him to follow the path of “white magic” and be wary instead from “black magic”. The most powerful talisman of white magic is considered quite the Holy Shroud. Perhaps it was this – concludes Paul Tritto – the path that led Hitler to design of possession. ”
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But luckily in Germany not everyone thought like Hitler!
Unfortunately
>On 19 January 1944 Moltke was arrested and the Kreisau Circle fell into disarray. The focus of some circle members had been turning towards an active political coup, and some participated in the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944. After the failure of this plot, many members of the Circle were arrested and were executed.
Libnk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreisau_Circle
So I wonder how a highly efficient information network could not know
anything about the fate of the Shroud. … Do they thought that this relic
was transferred to Monte Cassino?
In each case the systems of intelligence (= Monarchy and Vatican) had been effective in hiding the information to the German Nazis …
Maybe you can make a comparison with a “parallel case”,
namely that of “The Library of the Jewish Community of Rome” …
Today there is an article in an italian newspaper (“Corriere della Sera”)
about that “Library of the Jewish Community of Rome”,
this article is titled:
“Roman Jews (and the police) chasing the stolen library.”
>In 1943 the Nazi raid to document the “lost civilization”.
>Lost track of 7000 volumes. The suspicion that they are still together,
perhaps in Eastern …
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See also under:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsleiter_Rosenberg_Taskforce
>The ERR were also active in the west. After the German occupations of Rome in 1943, ERR officers inspected the contents of the Roman Synagogue’s two great libraries, which contained extraordinary collections gathered over the 2,000 year history of Jewish life in Rome. They demanded the libraries’ catalogs; just days before the first deportation of Roman Jews to Auschwitz, two specially ordered railcars destined for Alfred Rosenberg’s institute in Frankfurt were loaded with ten thousand books from these libraries
Link: http://www.governo.it/Presidenza/USRI/confessioni/doc/rapporto_finale_eng.pdf
= The Commission for the recovery of the bibliographic patrimony of the Jewish Community of Rome, stolen by the Nazis in 1943 was set up under the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (Italy) with a Decree of 26 November 2002.
= the systematic search of the Library of the Jewish Community in Rome…
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Here a strange secondary information:
>Vaincre claims that at one point, one of Alpha Galates’ members was
Hans Adolf von Moltke, the German ambassador to Spain. He was an Anthroposophist disciple of Rudolf Steiner, and the cousin of Helmut James von Moltke, a founder of the Kreisau Circle…
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Two other (= …two different Moltke…) links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Adolf_von_Moltke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_James_Graf_von_Moltke