Adolf Hitler wanted to steal the Turin Shroud during World War II, an Italian monk has claimed.
But the Vatican helped hide the cloth relic, on which is scorched the image of Christ’s face, in a rural monastery to keep it out of the clutches of the Fuhrer.
To protect the Shroud from Hitler, Vatican officials and the Italian royal family ordered that it be locked away in a southern Italian Benedictine monastery.
The linen sheet bearing the image of Christ has captivated the imagination of historians, church chiefs, sceptics and Catholics for more than 500 years.
The shroud will go on display this weekend for the first time in a decade. More than two million people – including Pope Benedict XVI – are due to see it on display in Turin Cathedral where it has been kept for the last 64 years.
The wartime revelation emerged in an interview Father Andrea Cardin, librarian of the Montevergine abbey, gave in the current issue of Italian magazine Diva e Donna.
He said: ‘The Holy Shroud was moved in secret to the sanctuary in the Campania region on the precise orders of the Royal House of Savoy (which owned it at the time) and the Vatican.
‘Officially this was to protect it from possible bombing in Turin. In reality, it was moved to hide it from Hitler who was apparently obsessed by it.
‘When he visited Italy in 1938, his top-ranking Nazi aides asked unusual and insistent questions about the Shroud.
‘Then in 1943 when German troops searched the Montevergine chur
ch, the monks there pretended to be in deep prayer before the altar inside which the relic was hidden.
‘This was the only reason it wasn’t discovered. Then in 1946 it was returned to Turin, as instructed by (Italy’s last king) Umberto II of Savoy, and remains preserve there in that city’s cathedral.’
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