An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town [Paperback]

There must have been a good deal of early Christianity that the Romans found weird, but Christian fondness for the body parts of deceased heroes and heroines seemed particularly perplexing. Christians actually dug up bodies of martyrs and kissed the bones. When St. Cyprian was beheaded, his followers rushed to sop up his blood with their clothes and then ran off with their sanguine mementos. Of course, some Romans didn't mind being bribed to give up a body for its parts rather than doing away with it in some normal Roman fashion, but reverencing cadaver pieces still seemed peculiar. It is still practiced, and it might still seem peculiar, and if so, the most peculiar of such veneration is the subject of _An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town_ (Gotham Books) by David Farley. Farley, raised Catholic and perhaps not as devout as he used to be, visited Calcata, Italy, an ancient town that sits on a 450-foot cliff, thirty miles from Rome, and accessible only by foot, or by mule. It was there he learned that for centuries the town had been a place of pilgrimage because it was the home of an especially sacred piece of a body. But in 1983, the piece was stolen. Farley's curiosity was up: the sacred item was nothing less than Jesus's foreskin.

As befits a travel writer, Farley spends many pages of this agreeable and amusing book on Calcata, how he got there, and his side trips to do research in Rome or Turin. There are plenty of freaks in Calcata, most of them quite agreeable, and since Farley and his wife spent a year in the village, he got to know them and he writes about them with affection. There is a famous architect, a 97-year-old American choreographer, an artist who might be a witch and lives with crows in a cave, an Italian B-movie actor who has art books featuring nude studies of his tumescent self, and many more. The cast of villagers includes, to get to the point of the book, the bibulous priest Don Dario, who was on duty when the Foreskin of Jesus disappeared. It was last seen in a shoebox in the bottom of Don Dario's closet. This was in 1983, or maybe 1986, and maybe it was stolen, or maybe it was sold. Maybe the Nazis got it, or the Satanists. Or maybe it was reclaimed by the Vatican, which is not so interested in corpse parts as it used to be, and wanted to hush everything up. Or maybe they took it so that a clone could be made, and this would be the Second Coming. After all, Don Dario had been put under orders not to show the relic to anyone and only bring it out for a procession on the Feast Day of the Holy Circumcision. In fact, he claims he can't even talk about it, and doing so might lead to excommunication. The fate of the holy prepuce is as murky as its history, which Farley reviews at length. The severed foreskin would be something special, because if Jesus was assimilated bodily into heaven, it would be the one part of his flesh left behind. Or would it? There was an ancient debate on the issue, with some saying he was made whole (his foreskin was returned to him) before his ascension. Farley does his best to untangle the provenance of the snip of tissue, which involves, among other things, being wound up in the legends about Charlemagne. Sometime after that, St. Catherine, who fancied herself the spiritual bride of Christ, wore the circular tissue as her ring. The prepuce in Calcata wasn't the only one; there were a dozen or so others in other churches, but the one in Calcata might have the best claim of authenticity. According to the story here, it was stolen by a German soldier at the Sack of Rome in 1527, and after it was found it filled all the air with the sweetest of perfumes and it spread glistening stars all around. This particular foreskin also was vouched for by St. Bridget, who had a vision of the Virgin approving the veneration of the tissue.

In 1954 there was a conference at the Vatican to discuss the Holy Foreskin, and although there was a vote in favor of promoting Calcata and its relic, the petition was rejected. Instead, there was reference to a 1900 decree that discussing holy foreskin would be a crime worthy of excommunication. Perhaps the church didn't like irreverent curiosity, and perhaps the church was taking an enlightened view that it was a mere "medieval fantasy," but perhaps the church was protecting it because they knew it was the real one. There are a thousand "perhapses" in this delightful book, and anyone who picks it up wanting to know for certain what _really_ happened to the _real_ foreskin is going to be disappointed. Farley's rollicking search for the truth, complete with picturesque setting, mysterious Vatican library chambers, a relic collection in Turin, secretive priests, and a town full of weird ones, is more substantial than any legend might be. We might, in all this lore, discount for sure at least one version of the foreskin's fate. The Greek theologian and physician Leo Allatius piously argued in the seventeenth century that the foreskin had arisen with Jesus, but that it became the rings of Saturn.

I thoroughly enjoyed this funny book. Part history, part travelogue, part commentary on Italian eccentricities, and a lot more, David Farley paints a wonderfully multi-dimensional picture of one of the strangest places in Italy and its "holy relic". He has clearly done his homework, as his detailed telling of the history of the "holy foreskin" attests. His style is light and breezy and his book is filled with so many interesting characters, that even if you are not as interested in Catholic relics as he is (I am not) it is still a pleasure to read from beginning to end. Just meeting all the unusual characters who live in the town of Calcata is worth the price of admission. Will this book help you understand Italians better if you are planning to go there? Maybe, but who cares! Read this book just for the sheer enjoyment of a story well told. Well done, David Farley. Can't wait for your next book.

This book is a fine idea, but I don't think it reads terribly well. Many pages are devoted to medieval saints and relics, and although I understand that a background of the subject is necessary I found myself skipping through large chunks of text. Additionally, the modern day residents that he encounters don't come across as particularly likeable and the author portrays himself as some kind of foreign buffoon. The awkward stranger in a new land has been written about many times before, and often with a lot more succcess. Parts of the book were interesting and funny, and I like the premise, I just think it could have been done a little better.