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“The Shroud of Turin: An Immersive Experience,” a $5 million, 10,000-square-foot museum on the chancery campus of the Diocese of Orange in Southern California opened to visitors on Nov. 19, 2025. / Credit: Everett Johnson, Diocese of Orange

Los Angeles, California, Nov 19, 2025 / 16:53 pm (CNA).

“The Shroud of Turin: An Immersive Experience,” a $5 million, 10,000-square-foot museum on the chancery campus of the Diocese of Orange in Southern California, opened to visitors Wednesday.  

The museum is presented by Papaian Studios in partnership with the Diocese of Orange and Othonia Inc., an international team of specialists dedicated to exploring and sharing the mystery of the Shroud of Turin.

The 90-minute experience introduces visitors to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with a special focus on the Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the burial cloth of Christ.

Inspired by the advanced technology incorporated in “Van Gogh Exhibition: The Immersive Experience” and the “Immersive King Tut,” the museum features 360-degree projection-room theaters as well as shroud replicas, interactive kiosks, a life-sized corpus, and a variety of artwork.  

Jason Pearson of FiveHive Studios, which offers AI special effects and animation services, is a Catholic convert who worked with Othonia, a team of shroud specialists, to design the museum.  Among his movie credits is Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ.” He has long had an interest in the shroud and has been a volunteer guide at the Shroud Center of Southern California located at the Santiago Retreat Center, also in the Diocese of Orange.

“Using technology on display like that of the Van Gogh or King Tut exhibits, we’re doing things that have never been done before,” Pearson told CNA. “Whether it be Jesus walking on water or through the streets of Jerusalem, or in the tomb at the moment of the Resurrection, we make use of sound and projections so that the visitor feels like he’s going back into a time machine and experiencing these things himself.”

The museum is designed for everyone, Pearson continued, even those who have no religious background at all. 

Located on the second floor of the campus’ Richard H. Pickup Cultural Center, the museum has three theater rooms. Using surround sound and images, including on the floor, the first room introduces the visitor to the person of Jesus Christ through presentation of 12 stories from his life, but each one is selected to show Christ’s connection to the supernatural (e.g. the Transfiguration). The next introduces the visitor to the shroud itself, including proof of its authenticity and what it tells us about the sufferings of Christ. The third is devoted to the Resurrection leading the viewer to ponder a pointed question: Who do you believe the man on the shroud is?

The third theater exits into the museum area, which includes displays of reproductions of items that were part of the passion of Christ, including a flagellum (whip), the crown of thorns and nails, as well as a reproduction of what the tomb of Christ might have looked like.

Other exhibits include an AI presentation of Secondo Pia (1855–1941) who, while photographing the shroud in 1898, discovered that its negative image offered a clearer image of the man on the shroud with a detail in his face that could not been seen by the naked eye. Another traces the history of the iconography of Christ, demonstrating how accurate, when comparing it to the shroud image, many of the icons were. And, one compares the Sudarium of Oviedo, or the facial cloth that covered Christ’s face after his death, to the image on the shroud.

Pearson hopes that the museum will be a prototype for additional shroud museums in different regions of the country. Inquiries have been made about establishing shroud museums from places as far away as Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

One portion of the museum is dedicated to the science of the shroud, and two kiosks allow visitors to ask questions of a digital Father Robert Spitzer, who has extensively researched the shroud over the past 20 years. Spitzer, who has an office at Christ Cathedral, noted that he was pleased with the museum’s opening. “It gets the pedagogy right, it’s biblically accurate, and they tell me the visual imagery is amazing.” (Spitzer has gone blind in recent years.)

He continued: “And while we welcome anyone, we especially hope many young people will come to learn about the shroud and lead many to come to know more deeply the person of Jesus Christ.”

Nora Creech is on the leadership team of Othonia and helped develop content for the museum. “We want people to come with an open mind, explore, and ask questions. We want them to ask, ‘Who is the man of the shroud?’” she said.

One special target group of the museum, Creech said, is younger people, “many of whom have not been brought up with knowledge of who Jesus is. That is why we seek first to introduce people to Jesus so that they will become interested in his burial shroud.”

Pearson agreed and related the story of two young women who visited the Shroud Center and began weeping, asking: “Why hasn’t anyone told us about him?”

But while the shroud is important in showing us what Jesus suffered, Creech continued, we also need the Church and the Scriptures “to learn why he suffered.”

Orange Auxiliary Bishop Timothy Freyer, who played a key role in bringing the museum to Christ Cathedral, noted that his favorite feature was the reproduction of the crown of thorns, which, contrary to most artistic renditions, was actually shaped like a helmet or cap. He continued: “I’ve been impressed with the entire exhibition. It is very engaging, and I believe it will be an important tool in helping visitors come to know Christ better.”

Also among those excited to see the opening of the museum was Gus Accetta, a physician who has devoted much of his free time to studying the shroud. In 1996, he founded the Shroud Center in Huntington Beach, since relocated to the Santiago Retreat Center and welcoming 25,000 visitors annually.

“It’s a wonderful exhibit,” he said. It not only looks at the shroud but the whole life of Christ, of which the shroud is just a part.”

The Shroud of Turin experience will be on display at Christ Cathedral at least through 2030. The museum is located on Christ Cathedral campus, 12141 Lewis St., Garden Grove, California, a few miles away from Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center. For more information, visit the website www.theshroudexperience.com.

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Washington D.C., Mar 16, 2021 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- As the Biden administration refuses to send unused doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to other countries, ethicists discussed Catholic thought on just vaccine distribution.

The New York Times reported last week that tens of millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine produced by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford are currently sitting unused in U.S. facilities. 

AstraZeneca has yet to request approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the vaccine to be administered in the United States.

AstraZeneca had reportedly asked the Biden administration to send the unused U.S. doses to the European Union, where the vaccine has been approved for use. The White House on Friday defended its decision to keep unused AstraZeneca vaccine doses in the United States, citing the need to ensure that Americans are vaccinated as quickly as possible.

On the question of sending vaccines to other countries in need, ethicists told CNA that the general decision to prioritize vaccination of Americans is not necessarily unethical. Saving unused vaccine doses for the future process of achieving herd immunity does not by itself constitute “vaccine hoarding,” they said.

“I don’t think that taking care of your own population first, or making sure that you’ve covered there, puts you in the category of [vaccine] hoarding,” Dr. John Brehany, executive vice president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CNA on Monday.

“The government does have a responsibility to prioritize its own citizens, to a certain degree, just like parents have a responsibility to prioritize the needs of their own children, to a certain degree, over the needs of other unrelated children,” Dr. Melissa Moschella, philosophy professor at The Catholic University of America, told CNA.  

The ethical calculus for vaccine distribution is “effectively applying the golden rule,” she said, or asking what the United States might consider reasonable if other countries had unused vaccine doses but still needed to vaccinate a high percentage of their populations.  

On Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended keeping the AstraZeneca vaccine doses in the United States, saying, “The president’s priority and focus is on ensuring that the American people are vaccinated,” and citing the need to be “oversupplied and over-prepared” in the vaccine rollout.

“There are still 1,400 people who are dying in our country every single day, and we need to focus on addressing that,” she said.

Asked on Monday when countries in need of a COVID vaccine could have access to U.S. doses, Psaki said that “we are engaged with a range of countries.” Biden in February pledged $4 billion to an effort to promote vaccines in developing countries.

Furthermore, several European countries—including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain—have already suspended distribution of the AstraZeneca vaccine because of concerns about blood clots, the AP reported on Tuesday. The World Health Organization and the EU’s European Medicines Agency have maintained there is no direct connection between the vaccine and reported blood clots, and have said the vaccine is safe for use.

Pope Francis has been outspoken on the need for coronavirus vaccines, once they were developed, to be available to poor and developing countries.

In an August 19, 2020 audience, Pope Francis said that a COVID vaccine must be “universal and for all,” rather than “the property of this nation or another.” In his Christmas Urbi et Orbi blessing, he reiterated his point that a vaccine must be “for all.”

“I ask everyone — government leaders, businesses, international organizations — to foster cooperation and not competition, and to seek a solution for everyone: vaccines for all, especially for the most vulnerable and needy of all regions of the planet. Before all others: the most vulnerable and needy!” Pope Francis said.

The Catholic doctrine of the universal destination of goods does apply in the vaccine distribution conversation, Moschella explained to CNA.

“When it comes to the genuinely superfluous goods that one person has, those goods really in some sense are the property—morally speaking, ‘belong to’—the others who are in dire need of them,” Moschella said.

However, she added that more information is needed on why the Biden administration is not sending the vaccine abroad. For instance, officials could be reasonably certain that FDA approval for the vaccine is not far away—and with many Americans yet to be vaccinated, the approval could present an opportunity to more quickly achieve herd immunity.

If the United States eventually achieves herd immunity and still has extra vaccine doses on hand with other countries in need of them, she said, the doses at that point could probably be considered superfluous and it could be wrong to keep them in the United States.

Other questions apply to this conversation, too, Brehany noted—namely the high mortality rate of developed countries in the Northern Hemisphere. According to Johns Hopkins University, Czechia has the highest mortality rate from COVID-19 in the world, followed by the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, and then the United States.

A high mortality rate might be another reason for the United States to hold on to doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, with so much of its population still yet to be vaccinated, he said.

Ultimately, the vaccine should be made available to other countries not out of any national interest for the United States, but because citizens of these countries are fellow human beings, Brehany emphasized. 

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St. Mary’s Cathedral in Miami. / Credit: Farragutful – Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

CNA Newsroom, Feb 15, 2023 / 15:45 pm (CNA).
The archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski, announced that his archdiocese will receive with open arms the priests … […]