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| The Holy Grail (Courtesy of Our Friends at EverywhereOnce.com) |
A few weeks ago we laid eyes on the chalice that Jesus used at the Last Supper, more commonly known as The Holy Grail. In Bruges, Belgium we’ve seen a cloth soaked with Jesus’ blood, collected by Joseph of Arimathea. In Rome, we saw the steps Saint Helen removed from the front of Pontius Pilate’s palace, upon which Jesus stood as he was accused and condemned and on which drops of his blood can still be seen to this day. Even back home in the states we’ve seen splinters of what many believe are Jesus’ cross, also taken by Saint Helen from Jerusalem.
And then there are the saints. We’ve seen everything from toes and fingers and hair of the much lesser-known saints to the bones of a few of the apostles, including Saint Peter himself.
It seems every church, every cathedral in Europe has a relic: a body part or some sacred object touched by one of the saints, apostles, the Holy Family, or even Jesus himself. This is for good reason, but to understand why, you have to wind the clock back a few centuries. You see, tourism today is pretty easy compared to that of the middle ages: it’s relatively inexpensive for us to take a long weekend, jump on a plane, and zip to somewhere fun and exciting. But this has only been a modern phenomena.
Leisure travel hardly existed more than a century-and-a-half ago. If you traveled on a regular basis, it was because of your line of work: spice trader, merchant marine, solider, or sailor. To go somewhere was often a (literally) once-in-a-lifetime event. And if you were going to go somewhere, you had to make it count.
That was the purpose of a pilgrimage: travel to make it really, really count. A few hundred miles is nothing today, but not so long ago (in European time) it was an expensive, often perilous, journey. The church encouraged pilgrimages, both for the religious value and for the economic impact, and churches and cathedrals across Europe competed to be the pilgrimage destination of choice. That often meant they had to have something exciting and interesting to see.
So is the chalice so prominently on display in Valencia really the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper? Are the bones buried beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome really those of Saint Peter himself?
It’s only logical that, with the economic pressure to attract the throngs of paying pilgrims to their towns and cathedrals, church and civic officials overlooked the provenance of certain relics at best and, at worst, fudged what was truly known about the object they claimed as a relic. This certainly means that some of the relics still on display today are of questionable authenticity.
Yet some objects have interesting provenance and are worth consideration. Stepping into the chapel in Valencia’s cathedral where the purported Holy Grail is displayed we found a stack of flyers about the relic (in English, fortunately for us). While we can’t vouch for the accuracy of the information, the history of the relic is documented back to the 3rd century. That’s still a couple of hundred years of gap: imagine trying today to gloss over a two-hundred year gap in provenance on an early American piece of federalist furniture. There’d have to be pretty solid physical evidence instead to land you an appearance on The Antiques Roadshow.
Even better provenance might be attached to the presumed remains of Saint Peter. They were, after all, exposed only in the 1930’s through an archaeological excavation after having been buried for about 19 centuries prior. True, the remains being “about the right age” doesn’t mean they are definitively those of the apostle. The relics of some saints, on the other hand, are most definitely authentic as their remains have been put to use specifically for that reason. I imagine a certain way for your remains to be exhumed and put on display was to live and work the life of a saint in Europe and die and be canonized between the years 1000 and 1500.
Notwithstanding the remains of certain saints, in the case of most of these relics–which I realized as I peered into the glass vial containing what thousands of pilgrims to Bruges have assumed is Jesus’ blood–it comes down to faith: either you believe the relic is what it might be displayed as or you don’t. Faith is a bit elusive to most of us that way, isn’t it? And I think that’s probably the way it should be.
