Happy Holy Circumcision Day!

Lesson: When speaking to a Vatican official, don’t mention anything about Jesus’ genitalia.

“The holy what?” said the voice on the other end when he heard the words “holy” and “foreskin” in apparently dangerous succession.

I explained in my most earnest tone that I wanted to learn about Jesus’ foreskin, the snipped off tip of the Redeemer’s manhood, severed from the Savior on his eighth day of life, as mentioned in Luke 2:21. I wanted to tell him that up until recently the Catholic Church celebrated this bizarre but historically revered relic every January 1. And that there’s a medieval hill town near Rome that was—and, in a way, still is—the epicenter of these New Year’s Day celebrations of all things holy and foreskin.

Pope Leo XIII stated in a papal decree that anyone who wrote or spoke about Jesus’ foreskin would face excommunication.

But I didn’t get to because he hung up on me.

This was no prank call. In recent years, the Catholic Church has increasingly looked to the past for guidance. Pope John Paul II created more saints than any other pope. Pope Benedict XVI has brought back the Latin Mass. Relics of saints went on tour in the U.K. and the U.S. just last fall and attracted hordes ofdevotees.

Yet there’s one piece of Catholic history the church would just as soon you didn’t know about. While a large part of the world is recovering from New Year’s Eve debauchery, a tiny hill town 30 miles north of Rome called Calcata is holding its annual holy procession today, a pious parade that the Vatican has tried to suppress for over a century: the Feast Day of the Holy Circumcision.

Marked as January 1 on the General Roman Calendar, the Feast Day dates back to the Middle Ages, when preachers would hit the streets on New Year’s Day, proclaiming that Christ’s circumcision—his first bloodshed—was a foreshadowing of his ultimate sacrifice for humanity. But the church hasn’t officially celebrated the Day of the Holy Circumcision since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) banished it from the calendar in the 1960s.

Despite its deletion, the villagers of Calcata hold their annual procession each year. After all, they long possessed the byproduct of that surgery: the carne vera sacra, the real holy flesh, as the locals called it. Il Santissimo Prepuzio, the Holy Foreskin. The only piece of Christ’s flesh that could conceivably have been left on earth.

And so, while I was living in this Italian backwater two years ago, I couldn’t resist taking part in the procession myself. As soon as the solemn parade of parishioners shuffled out of the church, a marching band that had been waiting on the piazza belted out a slightly-off-key, upbeat tune. The village mayor, the priest, and a well-dressed middle-aged couple holding two six-inch staffs of the village’s patron saints—Cornelius and Cyprian—followed the band down the S-shaped passageway that leads out of this fortress town. I jumped into the earnest entourage and about two dozen other villagers trailed behind.

How this tiny town ended up with a sliver of Christ’s genitalia goes back, as does everything, to politics. In the Middle Ages, the foreskin was a rock star of a relic. It lured pilgrims. It generated papal indulgences. It even had the power of duplication, or so it would seem. At least a dozen towns (most of them in France) claimed to have the prized prepuce. St. Catherine of Siena, the self-proposed spiritual bride of Christ, insisted she wore his foreskin around her ring finger.

All these extra foreskins didn’t sit well with the church and its own Holy Foreskin in Rome, the same relic that was supposedly given to Pope Leo III by Charlemagne on Christmas Day 800. The church had two dilemmas on its hands when it came to the relic. One, did Christ ascend into heaven “perfect” (i.e., with his foreskin intact), as was the central question of a quiet theological argument that had been simmering for centuries? And two, how to deal with multiple copies? The former was never conclusively answered, and the latter was put to rest thanks to Reformation fury that destroyed every alleged Holy Foreskin but the one in Rome, which was sent (via a marauding German soldier who’d helped sack the Eternal City in 1527) to Calcata, where it stayed for good.

It was housed in Calcata’s church for four and a half centuries and was a source of deep civic pride for the villagers. Every January 1, the priest would lead a procession with the relic and its 18th-century reliquary. Villagers would swoon at the sight of it. Some would rush the priest and kiss the reliquary.