Fuji Friday...True Cross (Because I Say So) Fuji

I am a product of Catholic Parochial School. Students were required to attend Mass each Sunday, and every day during Lent, the four weeks before Easter ...and Advent, the four weeks before Christmas. There were also Masses on especially significant Saints' Days. Additionally there were Processions, Confessions, Stations of the Cross and occasionally ...the arrival of a priest traveling with a Holy Relic. 

Relics could be anything from a piece of bone harvested from a martyr or Holy Beyond All Holiness... a splinter from the True Cross, that sad scaffold that held Jesus of Nazareth on the day he died.

To honor the relic, my classmates and I would file up to the altar where the priest presented the relic, which we were to kiss. The relic was encased in glass and gold and attached to a kind of wand... it looked a bit like a gilded darning egg.  Altar boys stood at the ready to wipe away any contamination (after each little nervous peck) with a deceptively snowy white cloth. This was an entirely unsanitary practice, but I've lived to tell the tale.

On returning to the classroom I thought of asking ...how do they know if the relic is real? 
And I knew that the answer would be ...because they say so. 

Once upon a time, so many churches housed so many fragments of the True Cross that in 1543 John Calvin in his Treatise on Relics wrote "if we were to collect all these pieces of the True Cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole ship's cargo." more wood, as a matter of fact  "than three hundred men could carry!"

True Cross Fuji 

Oil on Wood, Wooden Cross, Bronze Powder
10 x 12 x 2"
photo by Jay York