Holy Shroud was hidden from Hitler’s grasp in Benedictine Abbey

The Holy Shroud was transferred from Turin during World War II to keep it out of reach of Adolph Hitler, according to a Benedictine priest in a southern Italian abbey. Monks in Avellino, Italy stored the relic until 1946 “officially to protect it from bombs, in reality to hide it from the Fuhrer, who was obsessed with it,” the monk said. Sensing the dangers posed by German officials’ interest in the Shroud during a visit from Hitler to Italy in 1938, the following year the Vatican and the royal Savoy family decided to move the unique and revered cloth bearing the likeness of Christ to a locale offering more safety than the Cathedral of Turin. Father Andrea Davide Cardin, rector of the library of the Benedictine abbey of Montevergine, told Italy’s Diva e Donna magazine that the “unusual and insistent questions” from the Nazi hierarchy put the Church and the royal family “on alert.”