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
Feast of the Most Precious Blood Christ in the General Roman Calendar for celebration on the first Sunday in July, the first Sunday after 30 June, the anniversary of the liberation of the city of Rome from the insurgents. In reducing the number of feasts fixed for Sundays, Pope Pius X assigned the date of 1 July to this feast. In 1933, Pope Pius XI raised the feast to the rank of Double of the 1st Class to mark the 1,900th anniversary of Jesus's death. In Pope John XXIII's 1960 revision of the General Roman Calendar, the feast was classified as of the first class (see