The Foreskin of Christ

How the Holy Frenulum ended up in a hippie artists' colony. And other tales.

Calcata Vecchia, former home of the Holy Foreskin.

A relic is an object surviving from an earlier time, especially one of historical interest.

Me, for instance.

A relic is also a part of a deceased holy person's body or belongings kept as an object of reverence.

Being a Catholic country, and an old one at that, Italy treats its religious relics with heartfelt sincerity and over-the-top pageantry. Visions of the Holy Virgin are almost commonplace here, usually commemorated with a plaque of some sort, and your better visions are investigated by a group of professional ghost-hunters from the Vatican, who seem to take these things both seriously and not seriously, all at once.

With the exception of the Shroud of Turin, no object of religious veneration has attracted more controversy than il Santissimo Prepuzio di Cristo, the Most Holy Foreskin of Christ, a small, red, chickpea-sized object that until 1983 was housed in a jeweled reliquary in the tiny village of Calcata, about fifty kilometers north of Rome.

The only thing more fascinating than the existence of such a relic (one of fifteen holy foreskins, apparently—stop and marvel at the fortuity) is the history of said foreskin, which I will detail for you here.

A Barbarian horde ends the High Renaissance.

Il Sacco di Roma, Francisco Javier Amérigo y Aparici, 1887

In 1527, a massive army led by Spanish king Charles V laid siege to the walls of Rome. Charles, a Catholic monarch, had a variety of reasons for doing this, all of them wildly self-serving. If he couldn’t be Pope, he could at least control the papacy, and this decision to invade Rome forever changed the power structure of Europe. Many of his soldiers were German mercenaries known as the Landsknecht, whose brutality was the subject of frightened whispers. For one, they were Lutheran, which meant they had a personal axe to grind with Papist Rome. Two, they were savagely hungry, having not been paid their wage.

Before the Sack of Rome, the city’s population had been over 55,000. After the brutal and senseless slaughter of 6,000-12,000 Romans (the rest having fled), only 10,000 were left, which effectively ended the High Renaissance.

Once the walls were breached, the soldiers raped nuns, castrated priests, roasted their testicles over an open fire, and then force-fed them back to their previous owners. They caparisoned a mule in sacred vestments, led it through the streets, and then tried bullying a priest into performing the holy sacrament on the poor creature. When the priest refused, they quartered him.

The Landsknecht raided almost every church in the city, but when they broke into the Santa Sanctorum, where the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul were kept, their eyes popped at the array of goodies that lay before them. The saintly heads were punted in the streets like footballs, but the gold and silver chalices and jeweled reliquaries were gleefully purloined. One particular Landsknecht grabbed a small silver reliquary and tried to hightail it back to Germany, taking first the Via Cassia, but then diverting to a small mule path that zigzagged across the countryside.

Landsknechts were exempt from the sumptuary laws that dictated the style of clothing each social class could wear. Maximilian granted his soldiers this privilege because, in his words, their lives were “so short and brutish.”

At some point, he was captured by farmers, who tossed him into a makeshift jail cell in the nearest village of Calcata, where he languished for weeks while the authorities decided what to do with him. By the time they released him, the soldier was already on death’s door. He staggered back to Rome, found Santo Spirito Hospital, and expired there shortly after confessing to the theft of the reliquary.

“My son, in what village did you hide the sacred items?” the priest asked him.

Through cracked lips, the soldier rasped, “I don’t remember the name of the village, but a wealthy family lived nearby. Ang-wee, Ang-ou—”

“Do you mean Anguillara?” the priest asked.

The soldier nodded. At once, the priest sent word to the Vatican, and the Vatican dispatched a messenger to the Anguillara family, who searched everywhere for the missing relics.

Unbeknownst to all of them, the silver reliquary had been hidden beneath a pile of manure in the cave where the soldier was held, which is where it remained undiscovered for the next three decades.

Calcata: The Land That Time Forgot

Calcata Vecchia is an artists’ colony of maybe sixty (mostly lost) souls that sits on top of a volcanic up-thrust in the middle of the Treja Valley. There are moments at dawn where, if you stand along the parapet, you will see a rippling blanket of pink-tinged fog and wonder if you’re dreaming. The village piazza is accessible only by a narrow, S-shaped, cobbled footpath. Halfway up that footpath is the cave where, five hundred years ago, the German soldier had been held prisoner.

In 1557, back perhaps when miracles were still thought to be possible, pack mules started planting their front hoofs in a form of genuflection in front of that soldier’s cave, and the utter strangeness of this compelled the village priest to open the door and investigate. Reflected in the light of his torch was the silver reliquary the soldier had stolen containing three silk purses, each tied with a red bow. Astonished, the priest took his discovery to the Anguillara family in nearby Stabbia.

He presented the three silk purses to the matriarch of that family, Signora Strozzi, who picked up the first one and examined it closely. Inside was the big toe of St. Valentine, a 3rd century Roman saint associated with the city of Terni, epileptics, and beekeepers. Now, his holy toe bone was held up to the light by a puzzled Signora Strozzi and a priest.

“O, Dio mio,” the priest muttered once he realized its significance, crossing himself furiously. “Signora Strozzi, I am afraid to ask, but what might the second purse contain?”

Signora Strozzi untied the second purse, revealing a tooth and a piece of the jawbone of St. Martha, who’d been witness to Jesus’s raising of her brother, Lazarus, from the dead. In a fit of frightened reverence, Signora Strozzi crossed herself, and after placing the purse back inside the reliquary, gently lifted the third one.

“My hand,” she said sharply. “It’s gone numb.”

“Signora, we must pray,” the priest exhorted her, and they did, muttering away in the drawing room of Anguillara Castle.

Some time passed. “Do you think it’s … safe?” she asked him. “Should I again attempt it?”

The priest shrugged in that delicately fatalistic way of Italian priests. “If it is God’s will, we shall discover something.”

Hesitantly, Signora Strozzi picked up the purse and tugged on the red ribbon that bound it. Again, her hand was stricken by paralysis.

“Only a person of the utmost purity can open the purse,” the priest cried. “Someone worthy of God’s grace. A virgin.”

Signora Strozzi summoned her seven-year-old daughter, Clarice (Clar-ee-chay in Italian), who had no trouble pulling the ribbon and opening the purse.

When the the sacred relic appeared, everyone gasped. The priest exclaimed, “The initials you see there—N.S.G. They stand for ‘Nostro Signore Gesù, Our Lord Jesus! Behold, we have discovered the foreskin of Christ!”

The relic was placed inside a silver bowl, and a perfumed mist immediately suffused not just the room and not just the castle, but the entire village of Stabbia, where it remained for two days.

Turn of the century celebration of the Holy Foreskin in Calcata Vecchia

The Holy Foreskin was enclosed inside a new silk purse and taken to the Anguillara family chapel in Calcata. More than a hundred years later in 1723, a wealthy collector of relics, Cardinal Cybo, agreed to donate a proper jeweled reliquary for the prepuzio in exchange for one tiny slice of the relic. The minute he received the holy sliver, a perfumed mist rose, which confirmed the relic’s authenticity as far as the Cardinal was concerned. He made a second reliquary for his piece of the foreskin, and then in 1742, donated his entire collection to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome. In fitting coincidence a year later, Cardinal Cybo died a few days after the Feast of the Holy Circumcision.

Saint Ursula, 11,000 British Virgins, and the sisterhood of Mazzano

Hans Memling, The Martyrdom of St. Ursula, 15th century

Word grew that an obscure little village called Calcata (depending on the scholarship, the name either means “limestone” or “hidden”) possessed the Foreskin of Christ. In nearby Mazzano, the sisterhood of St. Ursula made a three-mile pilgrimage to see it, praying and singing the whole way. Their patron saint, Ursula, (who lived at some point between 300-600 B.C.) had been a British noblewoman traveling to be married. She and her entourage of 11,000 virgins were slaughtered in Cologne for refusing to copulate with the invading Huns. If these nuns feared a similar fate, they did not show it. Instead, they knelt on the church steps in Calcata until the priest finally agreed to let them in.

As soon as the sisterhood reached the altar, they began to pray, and a glittering starfield appeared. The priest rushed to the campanile to ring the bell, alerting the faithful that a miracle was occurring, and the faithful descended upon Calcata, crowding inside the tiny church. Those who couldn’t make it past the throng climbed up to the roof where they ripped away shingles to behold the spectacle, which lasted for four hours. Some were in tears. Others joyously announced that they’d been cleansed of their sins and redeemed.

And thus did the one-day degenerate hippie colony of Calcata become a site of great religious veneration.

Chiesa del SS Nome di Gesù in Calcata Vecchia

At some point the Holy Foreskin was lost, stolen, or “reacquired” by the Vatican

There is considerable mystery surrounding the disappearance of the foreskin. Sometime during the 1980s, a drunken lout of a priest named Don Dario may have made the foolish decision to keep the Holy Frenulum in a shoe box in the back of his closet. By then, you couldn’t leave precious relics lying around unattended; ergo, the top-flight security measures Don Dario used to secure his prize. In one version of his story, he returned from Rome to find the back window of his house slightly ajar and the shoebox missing. In another, a mysterious man and woman (“foreigners,” which always casts just the right amount of aspersion on any possible malefactors) asked to see the relic, which then vanished shortly thereafter.

What author David Farley purports in his excellent book, An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town, the existence of a foreskin became an embarrassment to a 21st-century Vatican, who promptly recalled it. An alternate possibility exists that the reliquary itself was dispatched to Rome, and the foreskin remitted to the crypt beneath the church in Calcata. Unfortunately, no one knows for sure, and to this day, its disappearance remains an unsolved mystery.

Now, of course, the denizens of Calcata are godless Bohemians. The prepuzio is but an oddity to them, a tale for tourists. And yet, before we congratulate ourselves on having evolved beyond such “superstitious nonsense,” I would like to remind you that three X-rays of Marilyn Monroe’s chest were sold for a grand total of $45,000 at a movie memorabilia auction in Las Vegas. In May, 2007, John Schneider, who played Bo Duke in the hit TV series The Dukes of Hazzard, sold his personal 1969 “General Lee” Dodge Charger on eBayMotors.com for $9,900,500. Remember that va-va-va-voom dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she breathily sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy? In 1999, it was sold for over 1.2 million dollars to a collections company in New York.

So, I don’t believe we have purchase on any intellectual high ground here. We’ve merely traded in Jesus’s foreskin for dead celebrities.

If we can’t have fame, most of us will settle for being fame-adjacent. That’s the truth. And there are few other differences between now and then. Charlemagne, an avid collector of relics, paid equivalent sums for pieces of the Holy Virgin’s Robe or the True Cross. Now, with equal gullibility and delusion, we pay $104,711 at auction for Michael Jackson’s white glove.

Like the Reverend Martin Luther King, I, too, have a dream. My dream involves somebody mucking around in the crypt under the church in Calcata, finding the prepuzio (which surely resembles a dried raisin), and having no idea what it is, tossing the thing over his shoulder. After that, this innocent destroyer of idols performs a real modern-day miracle by making supper for an immigrant family, much like Jesus’s, and inviting them into his home.

“People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.” ~ Dalai Lama XIV

Do you have an opinion on relics or religion? If so, weigh in! I’d love to hear your comments.