Notes the author of Relics from the Crucifixion: “It was the custom of the Jews to burn the crosses used by the Romans for the execution of malefactors, 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 statue to Venus on the same spot, hoping to obliterate the memory of the buried crosses.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– 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. Here you’ll read not only of the True Cross, but of the Nails, the Crown, the Thorns, treasured by Christians for generations, and even the very blood of Jesus.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. Read Less