The Shroud saved from the flames

No one yet knows how, on April 11, 1997, a big fire started in 4 or 5 places inside a chapel of Turin’s San Giovanni Cathedral (Italy), home of the Holy Shroud for over three centuries. However, the precious silver chest containing the Shroud, which should have been in the middle of the fire, had been moved to the main altar due to recent restoration work.

The fire was extremely powerful: it destroyed the Guarini Chapel, the 17th-century Baroque dome and the wooden gallery that connected the cathedral to the royal palace of the House of Savoy. The shroud in its silver urn was snatched from the flaming chapel by a firefighter who hammered his way through four layers of bulletproof glass: when it seemed that all was lost, firefighter Mario Trematore risked his life in the flames, sledgehammer in hand, even as everything around him crumbled, shattered and burned, to retrieve the Holy Shroud:

"I felt in my arms the power of the two billion Christians who venerate the Shroud. I must have hit it a hundred times, and God gave me the strength to break the bullet-proof glass. I managed to break it. It's almost a miracle! ... Finally, when all the glass had shattered, and as the beams were falling from the ceiling, I managed to grab the urn containing the Holy Shroud with both hands and to carry it outside as fast as I could. A few priests came up to me. Almost all of them were crying."

www.fr.aleteia.org (Translated)