The Holy Cradle of Jesus and other relics of the Nativity in Rome

“And she gave birth to her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:6–7). On the verge of celebrating the birth of Jesus, we tell the story of the relic of that simple manger, where the Virgin Mary laid the Son of God in a cradle made of wood and clay.

At the end of the 7th century, Patriarch Saint Sophronius I of Jerusalem gave Pope Theodore I the remains of the cradlethe “Sacred Cradle” or manger in which, according to the Gospels, the Baby Jesus was placed at birth.

These wooden boards, which would have been used to support the clay cradle, were donated by the Pontiff to the Basilica of Santa María Maggiore, known as “the Bethlehem of Rome.”

In the year 432, Pope Sixtus III decided to design a special place inside the primitive Basilica of Santa María Maggiore to house it. This is how the “Grotto of the Nativity” was erected, a replica of the Grotto of Bethlehem.

Later, under the commission of Pope Pius IX, the Roman architect Virginio Vespignani created the chapel of confession, located under the papal altar, with seventy different types of marble, mostly extracted from excavations carried out in Rome and Ostia.

It is here that the reliquary is located, designed in the shape of a cradle with a reclining Baby Jesus by the Italian architect Giuseppe Valadier. Inside are rods made of sycamore wood, a tree similar to the fig tree typical of Egypt and the Middle East.

In 2018, after Pope Francis decided to donate part of the relic to the Holy Land, various studies were carried out that confirmed that this wood comes from Bethlehem and that it is from the time when Jesus was born.

In the Basilica of Santa María Maggiore, also known as the “Basilica of the Manger”, (Saint Mary at the Manger), was where the first Mass of the Nativity of the Lord was celebrated, which later became a liturgical tradition of the Catholic Church.

In fact, until the end of the 19th century, the Pope moved to this basilica to celebrate it, and the relic of the sacred cradle was carried in a procession through the interior of the basilica.

This tradition is no longer carried out due to the delicacy of the reliquary that protects it, although it can be venerated by the faithful from Christmas Eve to Epiphany.

The custodian of the relic, Bishop Eamon Mc Laughlin, told ACI Prensa that, in front of the sacred cradle, “the numerous pilgrims who visit the Basilica rekindle their spiritual experience, sometimes dormant over the years, when contemplating this “mystery of a God who manifests His greatness in the smallness of a child.”

Furthermore, on the sides of the baby Jesus designed by Valadier, there are also two flowers that house other relics of the birth of Jesus, perhaps less unknown.

In one of them is the panniculuma small piece of cloth the size of a hand. According to tradition, it is a strip of the cloth with which Mary wrapped the Child Jesus. In the other flower a little straw is kept where the Baby Jesus was laid in the manger.