[PandaRosaMishima]

Forgive me for being a skeptic, but how certain are they that this is the real Crown of Thorns? Don't other churchs have various bits of this?
If you collected all the splinters of the True Cross you'd have enough to build the SuperDome.

[Suzy Quzy]

I don't know about the Cross, but I do believe the Crown of Thorns. The Catholic Church is a very skeptical Church, they do a tremendous amount of investigation. There was an order of nuns and priests that see after the Crown, they have it's provenance, and it's in an area all by itself in Notre Dame..it's in red velvet in a glasscase....and it wasn't all that big. I believe it with all my heart.

[Tax-chick]

If you collected all the splinters of the True Cross you'd have enough to build the SuperDome.

Urban legend.

[Flying Circus]

If you collected all the splinters of the True Cross along with the larger piece they come from in the Vatican you would only have a third of the wood of the cross. The splinters are just that- tiny little splinters. If they were as common as they are made out to be, they would be found in every Catholic church and even in pious Catholic homes... but I never saw one until a couple years ago when it was brought out for veneration on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

[Swordmaker]

If you collected all the splinters of the True Cross you'd have enough to build the SuperDome.

This canard of skepticism has been now shot down by good scholarship.

"In 1870, Rohault de Fleury in his "Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion" (Paris, 1870) made a study of the relics in reference to the criticisms of Calvin and Erasmus. He drew up a catalogue of all known relics of the True Cross showing that, in spite of what various authors have claimed, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four meters in height, with transverse branch of two meters wide, proportions not at all abnormal. He calculated: supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood (based on his microscopic analysis of the fragments) and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilograms, we find the original volume of the cross to be .178 cubic meters. The total known volume of known relics of the True Cross, according to his catalogue, amounts to approximately .004 cubic meters, leaving a volume of .174 cubic meters lost, destroyed, or otherwise unaccounted for. Other scientific study of the extant relics has been conducted which confirms that they are from a single species of tree. Four cross particles from European churches, i.e. S.Croce in Rome, Notre Dame, the cathedral of Pisa and the cathedral to Florenz, were microscopically examined. "The pieces came all together from olive."
(William Ziehr, Das Kreuz, Stuttgart 1997, p. 63)

A repeat of Rohualt's 1870 survey of the "inventory" of "True Cross" pieces held by the Catholic Church and private collectors was done in the late 1990s using more accurate modern measuring techniques and perhaps more strict criteria as to what was a "true" piece (For example, pieces that were of wood that was obviously not of the same species as the vast majority of pieces was excluded). It was discovered that there are are enough pieces and splinters to approximate the volume of two-thirds of the patibulum (the cross piece) of the cross.

[Conservative til I die]

If you collected all the splinters of the True Cross you'd have enough to build the SuperDome.

Now I don't have the exact quote, but from a book I read on relics, even if you put together all the pieces of the Cross that are alleged to be real, you'd still only have enough for something like a portion of a moderately sized crucifix, give or take, but definitely nothing along the lines of the Superdome.