Holy Tunic of Argenteuil: History and meaning

The holy tunic is the clothing that Jesus would have worn between his arrest and his crucifixion. This relic is a sheep’s brown wool tunic. Without seam, it would be stained with a human blood corresponding “exactly to the spots present on the tin of Turin, Italy”, explains Father Guy-Emmanuel Cariot, rector of the Saint-Denys Basilica of Argenteuil, where it is preserved. Considered a witness to passion, this play would come from a domestic weaving profession. “According to tradition, it is the Virgin Mary herself who would have woven the holy tunic,” said the abbot. Saint John mentions it in its gospel (19, 23-24). She would be the garment drawn by the Roman soldiers after the death of Christ.

A hectic story

After the crucifixion, we know little about his fate. No doubt bought from the soldiers by the disciples, the tunic would have quickly become the object of veneration in the Holy Land. “But between Golgotha ​​and France, we are forced to use certain hypotheses” to explain his career to Argenteuil, underlines Father Cariot. Certain columnists of the Middle Ages assume that it could have been in Jaffa (current Tel Aviv) then in Jerusalem, before migrating to Constantinople due to the Persian and Muslim invasions. It was at the end of the sixth century that the Empress Irene of Constantinople, looking for allies to the west, offered the tunic to the emperor Charlemagne.

Hidden, stolen …

Then transmitted to her daughter Théodrade, a nun at the Argenteuil monastery, in August 800, the tunic will then live multiple adventures: filled two centuries in the monastery during the Norman invasions of the ninth century, she escaped a fire during the Hundred Years War, was saved in extremis in 1567 when taking Argenteuil by Protestants. Cut and then buried during the revolution, it will be partly stitched. Finally, stolen in 1984, it was found the same year. If her authenticity and his historical career have never been established with certainty by historians or scientists, she remains for believers a powerful testimony of the passion of Christ, even if, specifies Father Cariot, “we absolutely do not need the tunic of Christ to believe”.

Loked in a reliquary, the tunic is deployed, in principle, every fifty years during a solemn ostension. This allows thousands of pilgrims to live “a meeting” with God and to “refocus on passion”, underlines the rector. And receive graces of peace and unity in the Church.