Secondo Pia - Ongoing Developments

Ongoing Developments

On June 2, 1898, the exhibition ended and the shroud was returned to its casket in the royal chapel. Genoa's Il Cittadino newspaper reported Pia's photograph on June 13, and a day later the story appeared in the national newspaper Corriere Nazionale. On June 15 the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano covered the story.

The next few years witnessed a number of debates about Pia's photograph, with various suggestions of supernatural origin versus accusations of errors in his work, his doctoring of the photographs, etc. In the meantime, King Umberto I of Italy, whose permission was instrumental for the Pia photograph, was assassinated in July 1900 and did not see the full story unfold.

Some definite support for Secondo Pia eventually arrived in 1931 when a professional photographer, Giuseppe Enrie, also photographed the shroud and his findings supported Pia. When Enrie's photograph was first exhibited, Secondo Pia, then in his seventies, was among those present for viewing. Pia reportedly breathed a deep sigh of relief when he saw Enrie's photograph.

The scientific and religious discussions and debates about the origins of the image that Pia photographed continued. On the religious front, in 1939 Pia's negative image was used by Sister Maria Pierina De Micheli, a nun in Milan, to coin the Holy Face medal, as part of the Catholic devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus. Pope Pius XII approved the devotion and the medal and in 1958 declared the Feast of the Holy Face of Jesus as Shrove Tuesday (the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday) for all Roman Catholics. On the occasion of the 100th year of Secondo Pia's first photograph, on Sunday, May 24, 1998, Pope John Paul II visited Turin Cathedral. In his address on that day, he said, "the Shroud is an image of God's love as well as of human sin", and he called the shroud "an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age".

On the scientific front, in 2004 the optical journal of the Institute of Physics in London published a reviewed article on new imaging techniques applied to the shroud during its restoration in 2002. Scientific debate about the image and the shroud continues with international conferences.