Circumcision of Jesus was for many centuries combined on January 1 with the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, before the two were separated, and now that the Feast of the Circumcision has disappeared as such from the official Catholic calendar, the other feast may be regarded as celebrating this too. At various points in history, relics purporting to be the holy prepuce, the foreskin of Christ, have surfaced and various miraculous powers have been ascribed to it. A number of churches in Europe have claimed to possess Jesus' foreskin, sometimes at the same time. The best known was in the Lateran
Women in the Catholic Church the early Christian Church as being inclusive of women as opposed to the medieval Church, which she describes as being "based on a gender hierarchy". The historian Geoffrey Blainey, however, writes that women were more prominent in the life of the Church during the Middle Ages than at any previous time in its history, and they initiated a number of church reforms. The Belgian nun, St Juliana of Liège (1193–1252), proposed the Feast of Corpus Christi, celebrating the body of Christ in the Eucharist, which became a major feast throughout the Church. In the 13th century, authors began to write