Your post about St. Valentine got me thinking: What's the weirdest existing relic of a saint you know of, and/or which relic has the craziest history/legend?
Look, there are a lot of contenders for this title. By definition, relics are MAGIC SKELETONS. Sometimes underwear, or hats. They’re all at least a LITTLE weird.
I considered the Mandylion, which was a towel on which Jesus’s face appeared after the ghost of Jesus wiped his face on it because a guy was sad he couldn’t do a good job painting Jesus. I also considered the amount of Mary’s breast milk that was being passed around in the Middle Ages (a lot) (John Calvin said about the sheer volume of this relic that “Had the virgin been a cow her whole life she could never have produced such a quantity.”
But, no, man. There’s only one that can be number one.
Go ahead, google “prepuce.” I’ll waiNO I CAN’T WAIT IT MEANS FORESKIN
This is Jesus’s foreskin.
According to an apocryphal infancy gospel, when Jesus was circumcised, an old woman put his foreskin in a box of oil. This box of oil was eventually what Mary of Bethany (until recently conflated with Mary Magdalene) used when she washed Jesus’s feet with her hair.
Anyway, an angel gave the foreskin to Charlemagne at the Holy Sepulchre, and Charlemagne gave the foreskin to the pope when he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.
The pope put the relic in the reliquary in the Lateran basilica, but it was stolen during the sack of Rome in 1527. The German soldier who stole it was imprisoned in the Italian village of Calcata, and he hid the relic in his cell. The village was subsequently plagued by strange storms and a fog made of perfume until the relic was uncovered in 1557, where it was the subject of many pilgrimages.
However, there were as many as eighteen different relics that claimed to be the actual Holy Prepuce all over Europe. The arguments over who had the real foreskin of Christ got so heated that in 1900, it was made a sin punishable by excommunication to even talk about the Holy Prepuce (whoops).
The Holy Prepuce appeared in visions to several female saints. Saint Bridget of Sweden saw an angel appear to her who put the foreskin on her tongue and she experienced multiple orgasms. Saint Catherine of Siena claims that Jesus appeared to her and give her his foreskin as a wedding ring.
Here is the experience of a nun named Agnes Blannbekin:
Crying and with compassion, she began to think about the foreskin of Christ, where it may be located [after the Resurrection]. And behold, soon she felt with the greatest sweetness on her tongue a little piece of skin alike the skin in an egg, which she swallowed. After she had swallowed it, she again felt the little skin on her tongue with sweetness as before, and again she swallowed it. And this happened to her about a hundred times. And when she felt it so frequently, she was tempted to touch it with her finger. And when she wanted to do so, that little skin went down her throat on its own. And it was told to her that the foreskin was resurrected with the Lord on the day of resurrection. And so great was the sweetness of tasting that little skin that she felt in all [her] limbs and parts of the limbs a sweet transformation.
Most of the claimants to being the real Prepuce were destroyed during the Reformation or the French Revolution. The most famous, though, the Prepuce of Calcata, lasted until 1983, when it was stolen. There are doubts about whether any Holy Prepuce still exists.
My preferred theory, however, about the fate of the foreskin of Christ comes from the 17th century Vatican librarian Leo Allatius, who claimed that, like Christ himself, the foreskin of our savior had ascended to the heavens, where it was transformed into the rings of Saturn.
Think of that the next time you gaze into the night sky.
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