The-Ave.US

Yes, it is true .. I am a New Year’s baby.

It is a wonderful thing to celebrate my birth with 3 billion other humans!  How many of them know WHY Jan. 1 is celebrated?  In the Catholic Calendar of Saints this is the feast of the holy circumcision!  Well it was on the calendar until the prepuce itself disappeared:

Jesus, like any Jewish male must have been circumcised.   This fact led to a lot of casuistic debate in the medieval church, bit even stranger is the relic.  From the Wiki:

Foreskin relics began appearing in Europe during the Middle Ages. The earliest recorded sighting came on December 25, 800, when Charlemagne gave it to Pope Leo III when the latter crowned the former Emperor. Charlemagne claimed that it had been brought to him by an angel while he prayed at the Holy Sepulchre, although a more prosaic report says it was a wedding gift from the Byzantine Empress Irene. The Pope placed it into the Sanctum sanctorum in the Lateran basilica in Rome with other relics.^[3] Its authenticity was later confirmed by a vision of Saint Bridget of Sweden.^[4]

According to the author David Farley, “Depending on what you read, there were eight, twelve, fourteen, or even 18 different holy foreskins in various European towns during the Middle Ages.”^[5] In addition to the Holy Foreskin in Rome, other claimants included the Cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay, Santiago de Compostela, the city of Antwerp, Coulombs in the diocese of Chartres, France as well as Chartres itself, and churches in Besançon, Newport^{[citation needed]}, Metz, Hildesheim, Charroux, Conques, Langres, Antwerp, Fécamp, Puy-en-Velay, Stoke on Trent^{[citation needed]}, Calcata, and two in Auvergne.^[5]

One of the most famous prepuces arrived in Antwerp in the Brabant in 1100 as a gift from king Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who purchased it in Palestine in the course of the first crusade. This prepuce became famous when the bishop of Cambray, during the celebration of the Mass, saw three drops of blood blotting the linens of the altar. A special chapel was constructed and processions organised in honour of the miraculous relic, which became the goal of pilgrimages. In 1426 a brotherhood was founded in the cathedral “van der heiliger Besnidenissen ons liefs Heeren Jhesu Cristi in onser liever Vrouwen Kercke t’ Antwerpen”; its 24 members were all abbots and prominent laymen. The relic disappeared in 1566, but the chapel still exists, decorated by two stained glass windows donated by king Henry VII of England and his wife Elizabeth of York in 1503.

The abbey of Charroux claimed the Holy Foreskin was presented to the monks by Charlemagne. In the early 12th century, it was taken in procession to Rome where it was presented before Pope Innocent III, who was asked to rule on its authenticity. The Pope declined the opportunity. At some point, however, the relic went missing, and remained lost until 1856 when a workman repairing the abbey claimed to have found a reliquary hidden inside a wall, containing the missing foreskin.

The rediscovery, however, led to a theological clash with the established Holy Prepuce of Calcata, which had been officially venerated by the Church for hundreds of years; in 1900, the Roman Catholic Church resolved the dilemma by ruling that anyone thenceforward writing or speaking of the Holy Prepuce would be excommunicated.^[6] In 1954, after much debate, the punishment was changed to the harsher degree of excommunication, vitandi (shunned);^[6] and the Second Vatican Council later removed the Day of the Holy Circumcision from the Latin church calendar, although Eastern Catholics and Traditional Roman Catholics still celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord on January 1.^[6][7]

The foreskin given to Pope Leo III by Charlemagne was looted during the Sack of Rome in 1527. The German soldier who stole it was captured in the village of Calcata later the same year. Thrown into prison, he hid the jeweled reliquary in his cell, where it remained until its rediscovery in 1557. Many miracles (freak storms and perfumed fog overwhelming the village) followed.^[6] Housed in Calcata, it was venerated from that time onwards, with the Church approving the authenticity by offering a ten-year indulgence to pilgrims.^[3] Pilgrims, nuns and monks flocked to the church. “Calcata was a must-see destination on the pilgrimage map.”^[6]

The story, from David Farley of Slate follows:

In the 1900s ” the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication. And 54 years later, when a monk wanted to include Calcata in a pilgrimage tour guide, Vatican officials didn’t just reject the proposal (after much debate). They upped the punishment: Now, anyone uttering its name would face the harshest form of excommunication—”infamous and to be avoided”—even as they concluded that Calcata’s holy foreskin was more legit than other claimants’.

But that wasn’t the end of the holy foreskin.”

Dario Magnoni, the local priest, supposedly hid the relic in homes because the town had developed a large population of hippies after a new town had been built near by. Farley continues: “I found myself sitting in a wine cellar halfway up the hill between the old and new villages of Calcata. Capellone, the cellar’s owner and a lifelong Calcatese, told me about his close relationship with a former local bishop, Roberto Massimiliani. Ailing in bed, the bishop told Capellone that when he was gone, so too would be the relic. Bishop Massimiliani passed away soon after, in 1975. Eight years after that, the relic disappeared. “To me, it almost felt like a confession,” said Capellone. “Like he needed to tell someone before he died.”

So, where is this relic?  Imagine the glee if it were sequenced, the DNA code would make huge news!  Farley finishes, ” if it had survived, it would have been only a matter of time before someone wanted to clone it. And that could have given the Second Coming an entirely new meaning.”