“Ahh. Yes,” I said, looking appropriately sheepish.
“Well, this relic head of Saint Andrew? It’s no longer here. It was returned to the Greek Orthodox Church in 1964.”
“So the Vatican has a Saint Andrew pillar but not the relic?”
“Correct,” he said, walking to the southwestern side of the basilica, where the gigantic pillar with the colossal statue of Saint Veronica stood.
It was a highly dramatic statue of a woman swirling a large cloth against what appeared to be a great wind that whips both the cloth and her clothing. It’s almost erotic. “Bernini as well?”
“Noooo. It was Francesco Mochi who sculpted this.”
He interpreted the Latin inscription: “The splendor of the church might keep in proper fashion and in safety the image of the Redeemer on Veronica’s sudarium, 1625.”
“So it’s been here since at least that time?”
“Well, that is what is so interesting. The Veronica icon kept here is a hoax.”
“What? You can’t be serious!”
“More than serious. The True Face of Jesus still exists, yes, unharmed, in all its glory, but not at the Vatican. It is in Manoppello, a small mountain town.
“Another cloth identified as the Veil used to be in Rome—or some version of it.
“That version was saved, stolen, heisted—call it what you will—from the plundering German and Spanish soldiers by an unknown person during the sacking of Rome in the sixteenth century.
“The pope ordered that it be substituted with a copy—until the original could be found and brought back. That never happened.
“Now a version of the Veronica, which is quite rotted—I saw it for myself in 2005—is the one they still display in the Vatican once a year from high above.”
“How do they get away with it then?”
“Ahhh, an interesting conundrum, no? Whatever it is, we know that to this day this mysterious cloth is celebrated as the most important of the four Reliquae Maggiori.”
“It’s the most important—and it’s a fake? Is the whole story a fake, then?”
“If you mean, ‘Does the Veronica story appear in the New Testament or anywhere in the biblical writings?’ then the answer is no.
“Yet it is nonetheless venerated as the most important pillar of the church,” he said, as we stood before the magnificent, sensual statue of Saint Veronica. “That is why I saved this fourth pillar for last.
“This is where all of the other relics are kept—right within the pillar. There is an entrance at the base.
“That is the level of importance given to a woman who is more legend than we may have been led to believe.”
“So there was no real Saint Veronica. What about the Sixth Station of the Cross?”
“The Veronica of the medieval Veil legend has never existed. There was no woman who wiped his face as he carried the cross, that we actually know of.”
“What? But they showed you the Veil imprinted with the face of Jesus, did they not?”
“No, they allowed me to see their ‘Veronica’s Veil,’ which is up in the pillar,” he said, pointing up. “It’s only brought out once a year, two weeks before Easter. They display it very swiftly from high above from that column.
“Only God knows why I was allowed to see it. But I saw with my very eyes that what it is, is a nearly rotted cloth showing exactly nothing. It has to be a fake, according to this ‘nothingness.’”
“So there is no real Veil?”
“I didn’t say that. In fact, three days after the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I was granted permission to see their earliest copy of the original Veil, which they keep hidden away in the Sacrestia della Cappella Sistina. It is a tremendously precious icon from the third century.
“It’s kept in a cardboard box, covered in layers of tissue paper. Their icon in a cardboard box! The relic has gilding around the outline of the face and has nails holding down the edges. we were even allowed, my wife and I, to shine a light on it. The face covers almost the entire linen cloth. But it had turned black, nearly completely.
“Here’s what’s even more interesting: When I gazed upon it I realized, Ms. Roussel, that I had seen a similar image before—but on the authentic Face of God, the one that is truly the most important relic in all of Christendom.
“The Volto Santo—what many call the Veil of Veronica. It was stolen from the Vatican during the sacking of Rome and brought in 1527 to Manoppello, although residents there claim that it was in 1506 … which I think is impossible.
“It has been kept in a small church monastery in that mountain town—about 106 miles from here—ever since. The church of the Cappucine friars on the Tarigni hill outside Manoppello. What is clear is that about 100 years after its arrival, the church was built. In 1638.”