Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 13.djvu/832

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SHROUD


762


SHROUD


miracles, but is now despoiled of ornament and left without honour, except by the few CathoUcs who chance to visit the cathedral. (7) St. Culhbert of Lindisjarne, see Cuthbert, Saint. (8) St. Alban, protomartjr of England, d. 304. In the time of Con- stantine the Great a magnificent church was erected on the place of his martyrtlom, where his tomb became illustrious for miracles. The pagan Saxons having destroyed this edifice, Offa, King of the Mercians, erected another in 793 with a great abbey, which became the head of the Benedictine communi- ties in England. (9) St. Swithin, see Swithin, S.\int

(10) St. Osmutid, Bishop of Sahsbury, d. 1099. In 14.57 his remains were translated from Old Sarum to the new cathedral in modern Salisbury, and there deposited in the chapel of Our Lady. (11) .S^. Oswald, King of Xorthumbria, was slain by the King of Mercia in 642. His mutUated body found a resting place in Bardney Abbey, Lincolnshire, whence, during the Danish invasion, it was removed to Gloucester Cathedral. See Oswald, Saint. (12) St. Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne, d. 651 within a tent set up for him by the wall of the church of the king's villa at Bamborough. It is related that St. Cuthbert, then a shepherd boy in the mountains, saw in vision his blessed spirit carried by angels into heaven. He was first buried in the cemetery in Lindisfarne, but when the new Chm"ch of St. Peter was built there, his body was translated to it and deposited on the right hand of the altar. A portion of his relics was after- wards taken to lona. (13) St. Ninian, Bishop of Galloway. — His tomb, where miracles were wrought, was venerated at ^Miithorn till the change of religion. (14) St. Thomas, Bishop of Hereford. — The narrative of numerous miracles obtained at his tomb in the cathedral church at Hereford filled whole volumes. A large rehc is preserved at Stonyhurst College.

(15) St. Wilfrid, Bishop of York, d. 709 at Oundle in Northamptonshire. His sacred relics were carried to Ripon and deposited in the Church of St. Peter, built by him. In the time of the Danish wars they were translated by St. Odo to Canterbury. (16) St. Wincfride, virgin and martjT, d. 600. Her holy death took place at Gwytherin in Wales, whence her body was translated to Shrewsbury in 1138, and there deposited in the church of the Benedictine Abbey. At the dissolution of the monasteries her shrine was plundered. Her miraculous well at Holywell is the only place of pilgrimage in Great Britain that has survived the .shock of the Reformation. (17) St. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, d. 1200, in London. His funeral was at- tended by John of England, William of Scotland, who had dearly loved the saint, three archbishops, fourteen bi.shops, above a hundred abbots, and a great number of earls and barons of the realm. Many anil great miracles took place at his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Eighty years after his deposition the venerable body, found to be incorrupt, was translated to a richer shrine, which was plundered by Henry VIII some centuries later. (1 S j St. Edmund. — This holy king was martyred by the Danes in 870. The saint's head, which had been struck off, was carried by the infidels into a wood and thrown into a brake; of bushes, but mirac- ulously found by a pillar of light and deposited with the body at Haxon. The sacred treasure was con- veyed to St. Edmundsbury, where the church of tim- ber erected over it was replaced in 1020 by a stately edifice of stone. In 920, for fear of the Danes, the body was conveyed to London, but subsequently translated again Uy St. Edmundsbury. The abbey church that enshrined his remains was one of the richest and stateliest in England.

Arta SS.; Bdtleb, Lives of the SairU»: Stanton, Menology of Enatand and WaUs (London, 1888). P. J. CHANDLERY.

Shroud, The Holy. — This name is primarily given to a relic now preserved at Turin, for which the claim


is made that it is the actual "clean linen cloth" in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus Christ (Matt., xxvii, 59). This relic though black- ened by age bears the faint but. distinct impress of a human form both back and front. The cloth is about 13 J 2 feet long and iH feet wide. If the marks we perceive were caused by a human body, it is clear that the body (sujjine) was laid lengthwise along one half of the shroud while the other half was doubled back over the head to cover the whole front of the body from the face to the feet. The arrangement is well illustrated in the miniature of Giulio Clovio, which also gives a good representation of what was seen upon the shroud about the year 1540. The cloth now at Turin can be clearly traced back to Lirey in the Diocese of Troyes, where we first hear of it about the year 1360. In 1453 it was at Chamberj' in Savoy, and there in 1532 it narrowly escaped being consumed by a fire which, by charring the corners of the folds, has left a uniform series of marks on either side of the image. Since 1578 it has remained at Turin, where it is now only exposed for veneration at long intervals.

That the authenticitj^ of the Shroud of Turin is taken for granted in various pronouncements of the Holy See cannot be disputed. An Office and Mass "de Sancta Sindone" was formally approved by Ju- lius II in the Bull "Romanus Pontifex" of 25 April, 1506, in the course of which the pope speaks of "that most famous shroud {prceclarissima sindon) in which our Saviour was wrapped when He lay in the tomb and which is now honourably and devoutly preserved in a silver casket". Moreover, the same pontiff speaks of the treatise upon the Precious Blood, composed by his predecessor Sixtus IV, in which Sixtus states that in this shroud "men may look upon the true blood and the portrait of Jesus Christ Himself". A certain difficulty was caused by the existence elsewhere of other shrouds similarly impressed with the figure of Jesus Christ and some of these cloths, notably those of Besangon, Cadouin, Champicgne, Xabregas, etc., also claimed to be the authentic linen sindon provided by Joseph of Arimathea, but until the close of the last century no great attack was made upon the genuine- ness of the Turin reUc. In 1898 when the shroud was solemnly exposed, permission was given to photo- graph it and a sensation was caused by the discovery that the image upon the linen was apparently a nega- tive — in other words that the photographic negative taken from this offered a more recognizable picture of a human face than the cloth itself or any positive print. In the photographic negative the lights and shadows were natural, in the linen or the print they were inverted. Three years afterwards Dr. Paul Vignon read a remarkable paper before the Acaddmie des Sciences in which he maintained that the impres- sion upon the shroud was a " vaporigraph " caused by the ammoniacal emanations radiating from the sur- face of Christ's body after so violent a death. Such vapours, as he professed to have; j)roved exjjeriment- ally, were capul)l(' of ])n)(hiciiig a dec]) reddish brown stain, varying in intensity with the distance, upon a cloth impregnated with oil and aloes. The image upon the shroud was therefore a natural negative and as such completely beyond the comprehension or the skill of any medieval forger.

Plausible as this contention appeared, a most seri- ous historical difficulty had meanwhile been brought to light. Owing mainly to the researches of Canon Ulysse Chevalier a series of documents was discovered which clearly proved that in 1389 the Bisliop of Troyes appealed to Clement VII, the Avignon jjope then recognized in France, to put a stop to the scan- dals connected with th(! shroud preserved at Lirey. It was, the bishop declared, the work of an artist who some years before had confessed to having painted it, but it was then being exhibited by the canons of Lirey in such a way that the populace be-