SPIRITUAL READINGS
SAINT PAUL VI
“Great is our fortune, if this … effigy of the Holy Shroud allows us to contemplate some authentic features of the adorable physical figure of our Lord Jesus Christ , and if it truly helps our greed, so burning today, to be able to also visibly know him! – with these words Pope Paul VI greeted the televised Exhibition of 1973 – Gathered around such a precious and pious relic – continued the pontiff – the mysterious fascination of Him will grow in all of us, believers or laymen, and the evangelical warning of His voice will resound in our hearts, which invites us to seek Him there, where He still hides and allows Himself to be discovered, loved and served in human form.”
SAINT JOHN PAUL II
Portrait, for those who believe, of the Son of God , the Shroud nevertheless offers itself to all humanity as an immediate reference to the sufferings of the Cross . A testimony that helps first of all to meditate on the dramatic reality of the Passion of Jesus . And Pope Saint John Paul II remembers this well, not by chance defining it as a “mirror of the Gospel” .
BENEDICT XVI
For Pope Benedict XVI, the Shroud is the very icon of Holy Saturday . “Dear brothers,” he reflected before the Linen, “humanity has become particularly sensitive to the mystery of Holy Saturday . The hiddenness of God is part of the spirituality of contemporary man, in an existential, almost unconscious way, like an emptiness in the heart that has continued to grow ever larger. And yet the death of the Son of God , of Jesus of Nazareth , has an opposite aspect, totally positive, a source of consolation . And this makes me think of the fact that the Holy Shroud behaves like a photographic document, with a positive and a negative … the darkest mystery of faith is at the same time the brightest sign of a hope that has no boundaries. And the Shroud bears witness precisely to that unique and unrepeatable interval in which God , in Jesus Christ , shared not only our dying, but also our remaining in death . The most radical solidarity.”
FRANCESCO
Hence the invitation launched by Pope Francis in front of the Shroud : "Let us therefore allow ourselves to be reached by this gaze, which does not seek our eyes but our heart . Let us listen to what it wants to tell us, in silence, going beyond death itself. Through the Holy Shroud, the unique and final Word of God reaches us: Love made man , incarnate in our history; the merciful Love of God who took upon himself all the evil of the world to free us from its dominion".