Christmas, which commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, being close at hand this might be a good time to recap the main religious remnants associated with Himself – the chief of which, relic ranker David Farley asserts – is "the Holy Foreskin."
As Catholic scholar James Bentley wrote of Holy Family curios: "None, however, ranks in absurdity with the cult of…the Holy Foreskin." 
There’s only one reference to Jesus’ circumcision in the Bible — in Luke 2:21: "And when eight days had passed, before His circumcision, His name was then called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb." But as Jean Calvin quipped: "They couldn’t let Christ go without keeping a little piece of him." The foreskin of Jesus has loomed on the periphery of many historical epics and movements, from the Carolingian legend to the Papal Schism to the Reformation to 19th-century Romanticism. Though there were at least a dozen claimants to the Holy Foreskin (as you’d expect by now, most were in France), the papal-approved version was stolen during the 1527 Sack of Rome and ended up in the hill town of Calcata, 30 miles north of the Eternal City. By the end of the 19th century, the relic fell out of favor with the church, highlighted by a papal decree in 1900 threatening excommunication to anyone who writes or speaks about the miraculous membrane. Still, the relic remained in Calcata until 1983 when it was stolen under mysterious circumstances, leaving the villagers of Calcata with wild theories on its disappearance: that neo-Nazis, Satanists, and/or even the Vatican itself was to blame.David Farley | The Smart Set
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