Chapter 1

The Prepuce, the Priest, and the Wardrobe

As Don Dario Magnoni draped the sacred vestments over his apple-shaped body, the pinch in his stomach blossomed into a knot. He had some bad news he'd been keeping from his congregation. He'd decided late one recent night, after polishing off a bottle of cheap Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, that this Sunday would be the day to tell them—after all, the New Year's Day procession was just weeks away. The reason for the knot of nerves was that he didn't know how he was going to make the announcement to his small audience. Church attendance had been decreasing since he arrived in the village in the early 1970s—now only a sprinkling of villagers regularly attended the Sunday mass—and Dario hoped the chilly December weather would keep more of the faithful from their weekly obligation. He straightened out his white chasuble and took a deep breath before sliding open the door that connected his house to the adobe-like church.

"This year," Don Dario began the announcement, "the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home." The priest paused, waiting for calamity to ensue. But the smattering of worshippers simply stared back at him in silence, a reaction Don Dario took as indifference.

The holy relic that Don Dario spoke of wasn't just the residuum of any holy human—nor was it just any body part. It was the carne vera sacra, "real holy flesh," as the people of Calcata admiringly referred to it. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the only piece of the Redeemer's body that he could have conceivably left on earth after his ascension into heaven, jealously guarded over in this secluded medieval hill town for the past four and a half centuries.

But now in 1983 the relic was gone. And most likely for good. After mass, some of the parishioners retreated to a nearby bar. Amid the posters and scarves of the Lazio football team, the churchgoers sipped espresso and prosecco and shook their heads in disbelief. "Who would take our cherished relic?" someone said without looking for an answer. But ancient Giuseppina shook her tiny fragile fist in the air and said, "I know who took it—they took it."

* * *

The mystery of just what the Holy Foreskin was doing in the priest's house—in a shoe box at the back of his wardrobe, no less—and why and how it disappeared, kicked off the most cryptic case of relic theft in centuries. Who would steal it? And what would they want with it?

For the last century, the Church's official position on the foreskin was one of silence, set out in a decree on February 3, 1900. Pope Leo XIII stated that anyone who talked about, wrote about, or commented on the Holy Foreskin would face excommunication. The Church feared the relic was being sought out simply as an "irreverent curiosity." The people of Calcata could still hold their New Year's Day procession with the relic, but that would be the only time each year it would be on display—and it would have to be from a distance and without commentary. The decree also stated that the word "prepuzio," foreskin, should no longer be used when referring to the object inside the reliquary. "Reliquia," relic, or "cosa," thing, would be just fine from now on.

But long before this "thing" had its quiet falling-out with the Church, Christ's foreskin was one of the most popular relics in Christendom. Saints pined for it: St. Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century Doctor of the Church and self-proclaimed spiritual bride of Christ, said she wore the foreskin around her ring finger; that same century, St. Bridget of Sweden claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who told her that the Holy Foreskin (then kept in Rome) was the real deal. Several popes wrote about the pious prepuce and/or granted indulgences to those who celebrated it, including Leo III (birth unknown–816), Innocent III (1160–1216), Eugenius IV (1388–1447), Pius II (1405–1464), Sixtus IV (1414–1484), Sixtus V (1521–1590), Urban VIII (1568–1644), Innocent X (1574–1655), Alexander VII (1599–1667), and Benedict XIII (1649–1730). The thirteenth-century saint Bonaventure tried settling a theological dispute about the foreskin's existence. And many of the players in the sixteenth-century Reformation (or those who inspired it)—Jan Hus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Erasmus among them—have weighed in. While in Rome, nineteenth-century French writer Stendhal had hoped to visit Calcata to see it, and several other scribes have included it in their novels: James Joyce (Ulysses), Umberto Eco (Baudolino), Chuck Palahniuk (Choke), Jonathan Gash (The Grail Tree), and José Saramago (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ).

Christ's flesh and blood are central to Catholic belief. "Take, eat: this is my body," Christ said at the Last Supper, as recorded in 1 Corinthians 11:24. And thus the Eucharist, that tasteless wafer the priest gently places on the tongues of the faithful, was born as a substitute to the Savior's flesh. The Lateran Council in 1215, however, insisted—though not unanimously—that during the Eucharist ceremony, the wafer actually became the flesh of Christ once it arrived in the middle of the devotee's throat. That a piece of Christ's actual flesh—and his foreskin, no less—could still be floating around posed a theological dilemma (and, undoubtedly, some discomfort) within the Church over the centuries. But also, the enduring enthusiasm—among the laity and, at times, within the Church—for the Holy Foreskin is a reflection of the relic as the literal manifestation of the Eucharist.

It also made a lot of money. In the Middle Ages, a great relic meant pilgrims, which meant money, prestige, and power to those in control of a relic—whether it was an abbot, a prince, or even the pope. The foreskin of Christ was one of those cash-cow curios that packed in the pilgrims. So much so, it was eventually copied and forged all over Europe. Depending on what you read, there were eight, twelve, fourteen, or eighteen different Holy Foreskins in various European towns during the Middle Ages. Coulombs, a French village near Chartres, had one. Chartres also had one; as did the French towns of Metz, Charroux, Conques, Langres, Fécamp, and Puy- en-Velay. Auvergne had two. And the French weren't the only ones with a holy foreskin obsession. Pieces of pious penises could be found in Hildesheim in Germany and Antwerp in Belgium. Santiago de Compostela, the famed pilgrimage town in the far northwestern corner of Spain, had one too. And, of course, there was the foreskin in Rome (the earliest and the one that ended up in Calcata).

Relics in general, and the Holy Foreskin in particular, are products of another age, a time when saints were posthumous medieval rock stars, pilgrims their devout groupies, and monks their roadies. The quest for salvation pervaded the being of every devout European, and the supernatural and natural were one and the same; thunderstorms, large gusts of wind, and dreams were often seen as acts of God (or, at times, Satan). Piety was the prescription for life's pain. And one of the main ways to exercise this piety was through the saints and their relics. The saints, particularly the early martyrs, had gone through a kind of suffering similar to Christ's when he made his sacrifice for all of humanity. They had achieved, according to the faithful, perfection in their deaths. So, taking the Eucharist—a symbolic part of Christ's body—at an altar that housed the bones of the martyrs and saints was a heavily loaded spiritual experience that was grounded in the physical. Believers considered saints—the Redeemer's henchmen, VIP residents of heaven—to be present at their tombs and at the spot where their relics lay. Praying to a part of their body was like tugging at their pant leg: "Hey, I'm down here and I have a request."

In centuries past, the Christian faithful relied on relics to do things that medicine, the government, the lottery, and recreational drugs do today. Relics granted wishes. They gave fortune and restored health. They eased pain and sorrow. They even produced visions for the devout. The more miracles a saint performed via their relics, the more popular and valuable that relic became. In fact, miracles were expected. When a relic showed up in a town or monastery for the first time, worshippers would watch carefully for possible miracles. A dead relic (i.e., one that did not perform miracles) was useless. Having a miracle-spewing remain of a saint in your town's church, however, was like having the godfather's ear: Your wishes and desires could be granted. A group of medieval monks worried about a fast-spreading disease, for example, didn't lock themselves inside their rooms; they plunged their patron saint's bones in a vat of wine and then commenced imbibing, hoping it would make them immune.

The Holy Foreskin, an actual piece of Jesus Christ, was, of course, the grandest relic of all. Before the relic's arrival in Calcata, it had been kept in Rome's Sancta Sanctorum—the "Holy of Holies"—where it mingled with the heads of apostles, among other esteemed objects. But how did the Santissimo Prepuzio, "the most holy foreskin," quietly go from invaluable to verboten in the course of several centuries, culminating in the 1900 threat of excommunication? And did this have anything to do with its 1983 disappearance?

* * *

My wife, Jessie, and I had actually been to Calcata. We were spending a few months in Rome and had heard about a bewitching medieval village plopped on a hill filled with artists and bohemian types. During our daylong visit, the foreskin may have come up in conversation, but I must have quickly forgotten it. Then one day, while we were sitting at a French café a few blocks from our apartment in New York's West Village, Jessie brought up Calcata. For the last year, she'd had a yen for a big trip—not just a few weeks, but a long adventure.

"Remember that cool hill town we went to when we lived in Rome?" she said. "Weren't we briefly thinking about moving there? Maybe we should think about it again."

"I don't know," I said, hoping it would buy me some time. In the past few months, I'd already nixed Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Mexico. The idea of moving to a small hill town north of Rome filled with artists sounded romantic on paper, but I didn't really want to give up my New York life just yet. Working as a restaurant critic and a freelance writer, I'd spend my nights attending rooftop cocktail parties thrown by various tourist boards, eating lavish meals at expensive restaurants that someone else was paying for, and jetting off to Europe on assignment for weeks at a time.

But then she brought up the relic. "Remember, there was that bizarre relic in Calcata? The Holy Foreskin? You love stuff like that."

She suddenly had my attention.

"And don't you remember when we were there, someone told us that it was stolen? Now, that could be interesting."

When Jessie and I had been living in Rome four years earlier, I'd take visiting friends and family around the city, and at the end of the day they'd say, "Gee, I didn't really ask for the weird-relics tour of Rome, but it sure was interesting"; I hadn't even realized that my tour consisted of dragging them from church to church showing them the arm of St. Francis Xavier (in the Gesù) or the entire three-hundred-year-old body of St. Giuseppe Maria Tomasi (in the Church of Sant' Andrea della Valle) or the place that really got me off: the Church of Santi Vicenzo e Anastasio, directly opposite the Trevi Fountain, which boasts the hearts, livers, spleens, kidneys, and pancreases of every pope from Sixtus V (1585–1590) to Leo XIII (1878–1903).

My fascination with relics began, at least indirectly, with my childhood upbringing as a Catholic. There were no relics in my church, St. Peter Claver, named after the seventeenth-century Spanish missionary whose vocation was helping (i.e., baptizing) African slaves ("I am the slave of the negroes forever!" he proclaimed). In fact, there was almost nothing to stimulate the senses, making it a shining example of post–Second Vatican Council church. The Council (also called Vatican II), which was in session from 1962 to 1965, was focused on bringing worshippers into "active participation" in the church. This meant Latin was out and the vernacular was in. Though Vatican II didn't address architecture directly (just as it didn't address relics directly), the way churches were built after Vatican II dramatically changed. St. Peter Claver was a white-stone building dominated by a glass wall on one side, which let in natural light. Gone were the dark, imposing Houses of God, replaced by the more functionalist and modern Houses of the People of God. Entrances were more welcoming (i.e., walls of glass) and the altar was moved forward so the priest could be closer to the people. Though the matter wasn't specifically addressed in the Council, by the late 1960s, priests had stopped performing mass with their backs to the parishioners. The result of all these changes, however, was a Catholic mass experience devoid of magic and mystery. At least that's what it seemed to me when my parents would drag me to church every Sunday. I really only have two memories from my churchgoing days: having to bring my older brother's and sister's Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, and AC/DC albums to our afterschool catechism so the teacher could show us the surreptitious Satanic influence and a play I once took part in on Christmas Day in which I played one of the three gift-bearing kings. I zoned out during the play and failed at my one obligation: Instead of putting the ceramic goblet down in front of the crib along with the other gifts, I held on to it until the very end.

But then something interesting happened: I took my first trip to Europe. I was twenty years old, and save for alcohol-fueled trips to Mexico in high school I hadn't been out of the country. In California, it seemed like there was no history. Everything was new and shiny and oversized. Europe was, in some ways, the antithesis: The cars, restaurant portions, and even the dogs seemed to have shrunk a few sizes. As a result, I became infatuated with all things European, from the nonchalance to the palimpsest of history that played a role in the everyday life of people.

But it was the grand cathedrals that really mesmerized me most: the Baroque interiors, the cherubs floating heavenward in a partly cloudy dome, the larger-than-life sculptures of saints looking down, and the ornate altars. For the first time, I was inspired by something inside a church. I wasn't ready to return to the Catholic fold, but I could see the appeal of attending a mass for an hour every Sunday. In the old churches and cathedrals of Europe, God wasn't an abstraction; God—and his army of saints—were everywhere in the form of paintings and statues.

And, of course, relics. There, on display (usually in a side chapel) were skulls and femur bones and pinky fingers and sometimes entire bodies. I was intrigued for other reasons too: These weren't just the remains of saints; they were the curios of a different time and space of human thought and philosophy, when all actions were attributed to God, a way of thinking that's been in fatal decline since the industrial and scientific revolutions. Relics represented a time when death was so near to us that we put it on display. I came back from that first trip to Europe infected with a new curiosity about the world. I had, in the words of the Church, an "irreverent curiosity." I got off gawking at relics—the more bizarre, the better. And this relic in Calcata sounded like the strangest and grandest of all.

Back at that outdoor café in New York, an eternity's worth of puns ran through my head. So did images of myself chatting up Italian priests and querying the Vatican about one of Christianity's most curious relics. What if, I thought, I tried to find out who stole it? Staring across the street as smartly dressed professionals raced for the subway to get to the office, I said, "Okay! Let's do it."

Jessie flashed me a look of surprise and I asked about the earliest possible date we could go. We ordered another round of cappuccinos and the planning began.

* * *

Before I stepped foot on Italian soil, I got in touch with an American woman I'd previously met who had lived in Calcata for years. Louise McDermott sold rare and out-of-print English language books about Italy from her home in Calcata and seemed like an endless source of information. She sold me a few books via mail order, including a pamphlet-size book she had written about the history of Calcata. When I told her about my quest—that I wanted to find the Holy Foreskin—she seemed intrigued yet pessimistic. "The relic is the reason my husband and I moved here from Rome," she wrote to me in an e-mail. "But the Church and the people here are very embarrassed about it. I don't think you're going to get very far." On behalf of a scholar in California, she had recently paid a visit to Don Dario—the priest under whose watch the foreskin had disappeared and, perhaps, the only person who really knew what had happened to the relic. "He doesn't speak English, of course," she wrote. "He isn't very lucid. And to be honest, he tends to look upon the wine when it's red . . . or white or rosé, for that matter." And then, to up the intrigue, she added, "After lots of probing, it looks as if 'stolen' isn't the correct word; 'disappeared' is more likely."

But Louise seemed willing to help. In fact, in her last e-mail before I left she promised to do what she could to facilitate a meeting with Don Dario.

I felt good about what I was about to undertake. And through a generous local named Alessandro, I'd even secured a nice, small apartment smack in the center of the village. But a couple weeks before my departure, I received an e-mail from Alessandro: "First of all, I sadly want to inform you . . ." the e-mail began. My first thought, of course, was that the apartment I'd rented wasn't available or that he was going to suddenly jack up the rent. But it was worse. Louise was dead; she'd suddenly and unexpectedly died in her sleep. And, of course, with her went all her secrets and theories and historical knowledge about the Holy Foreskin and Calcata.