Catholics lose priceless relic... again

Darn! Heeb magazine scooped us on this: The foreskin of Christ is missing!

"The prepuce had supposedly been kept above the altar of a church in Calcata, Italy, for over four centuries, only appearing in public once a year for the Feast of the Holy Circumcision. No one has actually seen the holy hood since 1983 (when it was stolen from a shoebox kept in the back of the parish priest’s wardrobe)."

Several foreskins have popped up throughout history. In 1856, a workman repairing the Abbey of Charroux claimed to have found a reliquary hidden inside a wall, containing another Holy Foreskin the abbey had claimed since the 12th century, but had lost.

(It's always getting lost! Can't anybody keep their hands on the foreskin?)

This led to a heated controversy over which was the legitimate relic. In 1900, the Church solved the dilemma by ruling that anyone writing or speaking of the Holy Prepuce would be excommunicated. In 1954, after much debate, the punishment was changed to the harsher degree of excommunication, vitandi (shunned).

(No penalty was prescribed, however, for blogging about the Holy Foreskin, thank goodness).

The Second Vatican Council later removed the Day of the Holy Circumcision from the Latin church calendar.

That's not where the story ends. Heeb remarks, "It's a comfort to note that the foreskin of the Antichrist is still preserved in a secure location."

Yes, Marilyn Manson's foreskin is for sale.

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