COMMENTARY: A physician’s study of the Sudarium of Manoppello brings a new look at the ‘dazzling brightness of Christ’s face’
For the first-ever Holy Year, which Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) introduced as a Christian jubilee for the year 1300, the most important destination for many pilgrims to Rome was not an audience with the Pope or even the tombs of the apostles, but a gossamer-thin veil purporting to show the face of Christ.
This was the cloth called the Sanctum Sudarium in Latin (Holy Cloth) and is better known as “Veronica’s Veil.”
The veil, regarded at the time to be the greatest treasure of St. Peter’s Basilica, was considered to be a relic first mentioned in St. John’s account of the resurrection together with a large linen cloth, which many now believe is the Shroud of Turin.
In January 1208, a barefoot Pope Innocent III carried the Sudarium in its crystal reliquary from St. Peter’s Basilica to the nearby Hospital Santo Spirito in Sassia for the first time in Rome, thus making it known throughout the Catholic world. Since 1620, the same cloth has been venerated as the “Holy Face” (Volto Santo) in a Capuchin church on a hill outside Manoppello, two hours east of Rome, where on Sept. 1, 2006, Benedict XVI became the first pope to visit it in 400 years.
The Sudarium has intrigued Gosbert Weth of Schweinfurt, Germany, ever since he heard about it and saw photos of the veil.
Weth is a 78-year-old physician with a doctorate in chemistry. A senior physician and head of the hormone laboratory at the University of Würzburg, he has been awarded the German Inventor Prize as the holder of several patents and has been a speaker at several world congresses on geriatrics and gerontology. Today, he is involved in research into new uses for hydrogen and continues to practice medicine in Germany.
With the approach of Holy Year 2025, Weth visited the Papal Basilica of the Holy Face in Manoppello on Sept. 26 to perform his own examination using nuclear medicine equipment that measures alpha, beta and gamma rays.
The shrine’s rector, Capuchin Father Antonio Gentili, opened the armored glass door of the display case where the Sudarium has been sealed in its reliquary since 1714. Weth examined the Sudarium for two hours on the first day of his visit, and another hour two days later.
“As a doctor, I can see this person must have been severely tortured,” was his initial assessment. “Hematomas are clearly visible both on the nose and in the area of the right cheek. … Neither traces of color nor traces of blood can be detected on the image. … Other bodily fluids such as blood or sweat are not recognizable. This cloth can therefore only have been applied to a person who has already died.”
At the end of his investigation, Weth wrote, “All in all, there is only one explanation for the formation of the image of the sacred face. The atomic change from nitrogen (N14) to carbon (C14) must have occurred under the influence of an enormous neutron radiation (light energy). … The ‘image’ is therefore not due to the application of paint, but to the nuclear-altered fibers of the carrier material.”
Weth also measured the beta radiation and said it was “considerably higher in the protected basilica than outside.”
“The reason for this higher density of beta rays,” he concluded, “can only lie in the existence of the Volto Santo inside the basilica.”
“The radiating of the Manoppello cloth at night can also be explained by this,” Weth said, referring to a phenomenon reported by some observers. “It is glowing in the dark because energy is released during the conversion (of carbon-14 to nitrogen-14) and light is released.”
In other words, the “True Icon” (Vera Eikon), as the veil has been called for centuries, radiates something from within itself. In this way, it is an image of the “dazzling brightness of Christ’s face,” as Benedict XVI said during his 2006 visit to Manoppello — a brightness with the power to give us “hearts stamped with the hallmark of the face of Christ.”