Excellent! I had read about the fire, so is this when it went to the Vatican? I wonder why the Vatican had not accrued possession of it much earlier in history?
What claim woud it have to it? It has always approached such things with caution.
(not wanting to go into the religious aspect too much)
Vatican position
Antipope Clement VII refrained from expressing his opinion on the shroud; however, subsequent popes from Julius II on took its authenticity for granted.
The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano covered the story of Secondo Pia's photograph of May 28, 1898 in its June 15, 1898 edition, but it did so with no comment and thereafter Church officials generally refrained from officially commenting on the photograph for almost half a century.
The first official association between the image on the Shroud and the Catholic Church was made in 1940 based on the formal request by Sister Maria Pierina De Micheli to the curia in Milan to obtain authorization to produce a medal with the image.
The authorization was granted and the first medal with the image was offered to Pope Pius XII who approved the medal.
The image was then used on what became known as the Holy Face Medal worn by many Catholics, initially as a means of protection during World War II.
In 1958 Pope Pius XII approved of the image in association with the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus, and declared its feast to be celebrated every year the day before Ash Wednesday.
Following the approval by Pope Pius XII, Catholic devotions to the Holy Face of Jesus have been almost exclusively associated with the image on the shroud.
In 1983 the Shroud was given to the Holy See by the House of Savoy. However, as with all relics of this kind, the Roman Catholic Church made no pronouncements claiming whether it is Jesus' burial shroud, or if it is a forgery.
As with other approved Catholic devotions, the matter has been left to the personal decision of the faithful, as long as the Church does not issue a future notification to the contrary.
In the Church's view, whether the cloth is authentic or not has no bearing whatsoever on the validity of what Jesus taught nor on the saving power of his death and resurrection.
Pope John Paul II stated in 1998 that: "Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions.
She entrusts to scientists the task of continuing to investigate, so that satisfactory answers may be found to the questions connected with this Sheet".
Pope John Paul II showed himself to be deeply moved by the image of the Shroud and arranged for public showings in 1998 and 2000.
In his address at the Turin Cathedral on Sunday May 24, 1998 (the occasion of the 100th year of Secondo Pia's May 28, 1898 photograph), he said: "The Shroud is an image of God's love as well as of human sin [...]
The imprint left by the tortured body of the Crucified One, which attests to the tremendous human capacity for causing pain and death to one's fellow man, stands as an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age."
In 2000, Cardinal Ratzinger, later to be known as Pope Benedict XVI, wrote that the Shroud of Turin is "a truly mysterious image, which no human artistry was capable of producing.
In some inexplicable way, it appeared imprinted upon cloth and claimed to show the true face of Christ, the crucified and risen Lord."
In June 2008, three years after he assumed the papacy, Pope Benedict announced that the Shroud would be publicly displayed in the spring of 2010, and stated that he would like to go to Turin to see it along with other pilgrims.
During his visit in Turin on Sunday May 2, 2010, Benedict described the Shroud of Turin as an "extraordinary Icon", the "Icon of Holy Saturday [...] corresponding in every way to what the Gospels tell us of Jesus", "an Icon written in blood, the blood of a man who was scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified and whose right side was pierced".
The pope said also that in the Turin Shroud "we see, as in a mirror, our suffering in the suffering of Christ". On May 30, 2010, Benedict XVI beatified Sister Maria Pierina De Micheli who coined the Holy Face Medal, based on Secondo Pia's photograph of the Shroud.
