The unique relationship between Jerusalem and Rome was evident on April 6 when the veil purportedly used by a Jerusalem matron to wipe the sweat and blood from Jesus’s face as he hauled his crucifix to the Roman execution grounds 2,000 years ago briefly went on display at St. Peter’s Basilica.
The veil – not to be confused with the Shroud of Turin – is placed in a silver reliquary and stored inside one of the columns surrounding the main altar in St. Peter’s Basilica, above a statue of Veronica holding a veil. It is displayed once a year on the fifth Sunday of Lent, the last Sunday before Palm Sunday, which marks the beginning of Holy Week.
The annual display of the relic is based on a non-canonical legend (not found in the Gospels). According to Catholic tradition, a woman stepped out of her home by today’s Sixth Station of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa to wipe Jesus’s face. She later came to be known as Veronica – a corruption of the Latin phrase vera icona, meaning “the true image.”
Skeptics consider the relic to be a pious fraud invented during the Crusader period.
St. Peter's relics
For centuries, while the litanies are being intoned, the faithful walk through the naves of the basilica’s Holy Doors to observe the blood-stained relic in the Veronica Loggia (balcony).
This year, after the solemn ceremony, Cardinal Mauro Gambetti celebrated a mass.
The veil, along with fragments of the cross and the lance of St. Longinus – the Roman legionnaire who pierced Jesus’s side to verify that he was dead – are considered to be among the most important relics held in St. Peter’s.
The 6th-century apocryphal book Acts of Pilate speaks of a woman, known as Veronica, who wiped Christ’s face with a veil as he made his way to Golgatha to be executed.