An Irreverent Curiosity

I was browsing the religion shelves in our local library in search of some Lenten reading when An Irreverent Curiosity (#165) caught my eye.  An aptly named book, too, I discovered.  David Farley is a New York based journalist who documents his quest to determine the whereabouts of a relic supposedly stolen from the priest's house in Calcata, Italy, a remote town outside Rome.  The missing relic in question is none other than the Holy Foreskin of Jesus.  Though once highly revered, this particular relic by order of the Vatican since 1900 could only be displayed to the faithful in Calcata once a year and anyone who writes or talks about it without Vatican permission is still subject to excommunication.  So of course I had to read this book!

After twelve years of parochial school, I knew about relics, and that there was a relic embedded in the altar stone of our church, but no one ever saw it.  On the other hand, I lived within walking distance of the various museums at Harvard, and spent a great deal of time with my friends looking at some of the strange objects on display which turned out to be reliquaries.  Lots of silver and gold and jewels, but not anything I'd ever want to have in my own house.  David Farley became similarly fascinated by the cult of these relics and moves with his wife and dog to the medieval hill town of Calcata to see if he can sort out how the Holy Foreskin arrived there in the first place, and what really happened to it on that fateful day in 1983.  I actually did learn quite a bit about how and why relics became popular in the early Christian church.  It should come as no surprise that relics also played an important role in the Reformation and succeeding religious wars.  But what makes this book so entertaining (once you get over the ewh! factor of this particular relic) are Farley's tales of all the quirky characters he meets while living in this town and his attempts to conduct this investigation with minimal fluency in Italian when he begins.  How do you make any progress if no one seems to know anything, or refuses to discuss the Holy Foreskin?

I'm not sure exactly how I'd characterize this book; it's shelved with religious texts, but it's just as much of a travel book in some ways.  It's probably not to everyone's taste, but it did get me thinking about some aspects of religious worship and why they became important.  And that was my goal in seeking out a book from this section.