This is a brass kiss reliquary with in the centre a copper theca with silver front, inside a relic of the True Cross of our Lord Jesus. Relic in place and wax seal and threads intact.Comes from a convent in Belgium.Measures 5,8 inch diameter and 2,5 inch deep.Shipping and handling US$ 32.00 by insured priority mail and tracking number .All my items are securely packet, to avoid all possible damage.

As per Ebay policy,this reliquary does not contain human remains but only objects of devotion. The auction is for the theca, the relic is a gift.

Please be carefull when buying relics online. Fake relics are increasingly more and more of a problem. Most of the relics I sell are from convents in Belgium and Italy. I have been collecting relics for more than 25 years. I consider myself an expert. Please contact me if you have any questions.

 

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This is a original item and no copie or new made fake!

 

The Most Holy Wood of the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ

According to several Church historians of the 4th and 5th century, the True Cross was discovered in 325 AD when Emperor Constantine the Great ordered the removal of a pagan temple built by Hadrian over the site of the Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre. Beneath the structure, in an old cistern, three crosses, the title with the inscription "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews", and three nails were found. In the presence of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, the Cross of Christ was identified by the 'titulus' and the nail holes, and later confirmed by a miracle. It was laid upon a sick woman who was immediately miraculously cured.

Helena divided the most precious wood into several parts, leaving a fragment in Jerusalem, sending a second to her son in Constantinople and taking a third to Rome. A part of it and half of the title with the inscription I NAZARINUS R... is still preserved and venerated in the Basilica di S. Croce, one of the seven main churches of the Eternal City. In 1998, a careful investigation was commissioned by the Holy See and seven Israeli experts on the dating of inscriptions (comparative palaeography) dated its letters into the 1st century, the time of Christ. This suddenly gave the 'legend of the Finding of the Cross' a lot of credibility.

Already in 349 AD, St. Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, stated that the True Cross "has been distributed, fragment by fragment, from this spot (Jerusalem) and has already nearly filled the world", confirming the early practise of distributing tiny particles of the Most Holy Wood. When St. Paulinus of Nola sent one to a friend in ca. 401 AD, he wrote: "Receive a great gift in a little case and take this segment as an armament against the perils of the present and a pledge of everlasting safety". He stressed that "even the smallest particle bears in it the whole power of the Cross of Christ". 

The claim of the "enlightened" sceptics, that all relics of the True Cross would be sufficient to build a ship, was proven wrong in 1870 by the French scholar Rohault de Fleury, who mathematically calculated the volume of all relics of the True Cross in all European Cathedrals and found them all together having the mass of only one third of a Roman cross!