Relics from the Crucifixion

Why, in 326, St. Helena could find the remains of the True Cross. Notes the author of The Relics of Christ’s Passion: “It was the custom of the Jews to burn the crosses used by the Romans for the execution of malefac¬tors, but the haste observed on this occasion to get everything out of sight before the feast of the Passover readily accounts for these three crosses being thrown into the city ditch, or a hole, and buried from view, instead of the longer task of burning.”. That preserved the actual crosses; memory of the events preserved their location. Disgusted with continued Christian veneration of the spot, in the year 136 the pagan Roman Emperor Hadrian erected on the crosses’ burial site a statue to Venus, hoping thereby to obliterate their memory.It didn’t work, which is why, once the Empire became Christian, the Emperor’s mother Helena went right to that spot to seek – and to find still buried there in the dry earth – the wood of the very Cross on which Christ died.The rest is history, told here in this fascinating 1910 work by the enterprising Catholic investigator J. Charles Wall, who scoured the writings of the ancients to draw forth from those pages an account of the many relics of the Passion found there by Helena and slowly dispersed throughout Christendom. Here you’ll read of the tree from which the Cross was made, as well of the Nails that bore his battered body, the Crown placed on his head, the Thorns, treasured by Christians for generations, and even the very blood of Jesus caught in vessels by those who loved Him and preserved down to this day.Too easily we skeptical moderns dismiss the authenticity of relics, particularly relics of the kinds that have often been forged. Author Wall here cites so many reliable sources about relics of Christ’s Passion that you will put down these pages with doubts about your doubts, and find in yourself a new and growing desire to look upon them yourself and to receive the many graces that – as Wall also reports here – regularly flow from them for the benefit of souls.. Among the things you’ll encounter in these pages:•The miracle that revealed to St. Helena which of the three discovered crosses was that of Jesus•The horse’s bit made from a nail of the True Cross, and the successes it brought the horse’s rider, and the Pope who swore an oath upon that very nail•The claim that there are enough relics of the cross to build a ship — and how it is easily proven outrageously false•Where, in 1492, workman accidentally discovered again the actual board on which was “King of the Jews” was written•The nails — and why there are so many in existence today•The crown of thorns, and where you can go to see one of the thorns•July 5, 1187: the tragic day that Christians lost the beam of the Cross, never to recover it again•The modest Frenchman who saved a holy nail from profanation during the French Revolution•A history of the fortunes the Crown of Thorns to those who held them, and a list of towns where thorns are found •Drawings of the spear of Longinus, and reports of its later use in battles•Relics of Jesus’s actual blood from the Crucifixion: and why it makes sense that some still exists•The veil of Veronica, Christ’s seamless robe, and much more!. . .