Holy Rood Day
Officially known as the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, today used also to be called Holy Rood Day, or Roodmas. Some authorities say the Catholic Church feast commemorates the restoration of the 'True Cross' to Calvary in 629, after the victory of Emperor Heraclius over the Persians. Others say it commemorates the raising of the 'true' Christian cross in the church at Jerusalem in 335 (some sources say 326) by the Empress Helena (Flavia Iulia Helena, also known as St Helena and Helena of Constantinople, c. 248 - c. 329 CE), mother of Constantine. Today may be considered a christianization of the ancient Eleusis feast of Demeter (see Greater Eleusinian Mysteries).
In 1561 John Calvin wrote a tract that said that if all the pieces of the True Cross were gathered together, they would load a large ship, and would take 300 men, not one, to carry it ...
Categories: christianity, folklore, calendar-customs, saint
Pip Wilson posted item above at 1:01 PM | Permalink
1 Comments:
Calvin also said that God created some people just to burn in Hell. Anyway, here is what the Catholic Encyclopedia says about the lie regarding the supposed volume of relics of the True Cross:
"The work of Rohault de Fleury, "Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion" (Paris, 1870), deserves more prolonged attention; its author has sought out with great care and learning all the relics of the True Cross, drawn up a catalogue of them, and, thanks to this labour, he has succeeded in showing that, in spite of what various Protestant or Rationalistic authors have pretended, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not only not "be comparable in bulk to a battleship", but would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four metres in height, with transverse branch of two metres (see above; under I), proportions not at all abnormal (op. cit., 97-179). Here is the calculation of this savant: Supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood, as is believed by the savants who have made a special study of the subject, and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilograms, we find that the volume of this cross was 178,000,000 cubic millimetres. Now the total known volume of the True Cross, according to the finding of M. Rohault de Fleury, amounts to above 4,000 000 cubic millimetres, allowing the missing part to be as big as we will, the lost parts or the parts the existence of which has been overlooked, we still find ourselves far short of 178,000,000 cubic millimetres, which should make up the True Cross."
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