Holy Chalice

With the preceding description of the breaking of bread, it is the foundation for the Eucharist or Holy Communion, celebrated regularly in many Christian churches.

[citation needed] St. John Chrysostom (347–407 AD) in his homily on Matthew asserted: The table was not of silver, the chalice was not of gold in which Christ gave His blood to His disciples to drink, and yet everything there was precious and truly fit to inspire awe.The pilgrim Antoninus of Piacenza (570 AD) in his descriptions of the holy places of Jerusalem, said that he saw "the cup of onyx, which our Lord blessed at the last supper" among many relics displayed at the Basilica erected by Constantine near to Golgotha and the Tomb of Christ.

In the sixth and seventh centuries pilgrims to Jerusalem were led to believe that the actual chalice was still venerated in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, having within it the sponge which was presented to Our Saviour on Calvary.

[6] The second is the Sacro Catino in Genoa Cathedral, a flat dish made of green glass; recovered from Caesarea in 1101, it was not identified as the Holy Chalice until much later, towards the end of the 13th century.

The chalice is commonly credited as being the actual Holy Grail used by Jesus during the Last Supper[6] and is preserved in a chapel consecrated to it, where it still attracts the faithful on pilgrimage.

[7] It is kept together with an inventory list on vellum, said to have accompanied a lost letter which detailed state-sponsored Roman persecution of Christians that forced the church to split up its treasury and hide it with members, specifically the deacon Saint Lawrence.

[citation needed] Reference to the chalice is made again in 1399, when it was given by the monastery of San Juan de la Peña to king Martin I of Aragon in exchange for a gold cup.

In July 2006, at the closing Mass of the 5th World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Pope Benedict XVI also celebrated Mass with the Holy Chalice, on this occasion calling it "this most famous chalice" (hunc praeclarum Calicem), words in the Roman Canon said to have been used for the first popes to refer to the Holy Grail until the 4th century in Rome.

William of Tyre (10.16) describes it as a "vessel of the most green colour, in the shape of a serving dish" (vas coloris viridissimi, in modum parapsidis formatum) which the Genoese thought to be made of emerald, and accepted as their share of the spoils.

William states that the Genoese were still exhibiting the bowl, insisting on its miraculous properties due to its being made of emerald, in his own day (Unde et usque hodie transeuntibus per eos magnatibus, vas idem quasi pro miraculo solent ostendere, persuadentes quod vere sit, id quod color esse indicat, smaragdus), the implication being that emerald was thought to have miraculous properties of its own in medieval lore, and not that the bowl was thought of as a holy relic.

[11] The connection of this artifact to the Holy Grail was made in the 2014 book Los Reyes del Grial, which develops the hypothesis that this artifact had been taken by Egyptian troops following the invasion of Jerusalem and the looting of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, then given by the Emir of Egypt to the Emir of Denia, who in the 11th century gave it to the Kings of Leon for them to spare his city in the Reconquista.

It was apparently made at Antioch in the early 6th century, and is of double-cup construction, with an outer shell of cast-metal open work, enclosing a plain silver inner cup.