I read somewhere that the chalice Christ used in the Last Supper is still in existence, supposedly in Valencia, Spain. I find that hard to believe. Is it true?
St Matthew relates that in the Last Supper, Our Lord “took a chalice, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26:27-28).
There is a strong tradition that the chalice he used is kept in the cathedral of Valencia.
The pilgrim Antoninus of Piacenza related in his account of the holy places he visited in Jerusalem in 570 AD that he saw, among the relics displayed at the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre built by Constantine, “the cup of onyx, which Our Lord blessed at the Last Supper.”
In the seventh century, Arculf, an Anglo-Saxon pilgrim, also mentioned having venerated the holy chalice there.
The chalice on display in the cathedral of Valencia has a cup of dark red agate, mounted by means of a knobbed stem and two curved handles on a base made from an inverted cup of chalcedony.
Only the upper cup is of ancient origin, the rest having been added centuries later.
Apparently, the agate from which it is made is found only in the Holy Land.
It is thought to have been made in a Palestinian or Egyptian workshop between the fourth century BC and the first century AD.
The chalice is kept along with an inventory on vellum, said to date from 262 AD, which accompanied a lost letter which detailed the persecution of the Church by the Roman emperor Valerian.
According to the tradition in 258 AD, when the emperor asked that all the Church’s relics be handed over, Pope Sixtus II gave the chalice to his deacon St Lawrence, who in turn passed it on to a Spanish soldier, Proselius, with instructions to take it for safekeeping to Lawrence’s home country of Spain.
The inventory describes the physical properties of the chalice and says that it was used to celebrate Mass by the early Popes following St Peter.
According to this tradition, which obviously conflicts with the accounts of the veneration of the chalice in Jerusalem in the sixth and seventh centuries, St Peter himself took the chalice to Rome in the first century.
Another explicit reference to the Valencia chalice is found in an inventory in the tenth-century monastery of San Juan de la Peña, located near the town of Jaca, in the province of Huesca, in the north of Spain.
Drawn up on 14 December 1134, it states: “In an ivory chest is the Chalice in which Christ Our Lord consecrated his Blood, sent by St Lawrence to his homeland, Huesca.” A further reference was made in 1399, when the chalice was given by the monastery to King Martin I of Aragon in exchange for a gold cup.
Janice Bennett, in her book Saint Lawrence and the Holy Grail (2004), argues for the authenticity of the chalice, tracing its history from St Peter taking the chalice to Rome, through Pope Sixtus II and St Lawrence, to the Monastery of San Juan de la Peña, and then to King Martin I.
She presents as evidence a seventeenth-century Spanish text entitled Life and Martyrdom of the Glorious Spaniard St Lawrence found in a monastery in Valencia.
It is supposedly a translation of a sixth-century life of Saint Lawrence written in Latin by Donato, an Augustinian monk who founded a monastery near Valencia.
It contains circumstantial details of the life of St Lawrence and of the transfer of the chalice to Spain.
Bennett argues that St Juan de Ribera (1532-1611), the Archbishop of Valencia, allowed the veneration only of relics whose authenticity could be verified with certainty, and that he encouraged veneration of the holy chalice.
The Spanish art historian Ana Mafé Garcia, in her doctoral dissertation on the chalice, writes that there is a 99.9 per cent chance of the chalice being the one used by Christ.
Based on the form and measurements of the chalice, as well as on other details, she concludes that it is of ancient Jewish heritage, of the time of King Herod the Great.
Of interest is the fact that Pope St John Paul II celebrated Mass with the chalice on a visit to Valencia in November 1982, and Pope Benedict XVI did likewise at the closing Mass of the Fifth World Meeting of Families in July 2006.
