Guillaume Farel, leader of the Reformation in France and Switzerland, and friend and mentor to John Calvin, was deeply impressed by a pilgrimage he made as a child. As is often the case with religious converts, he could remember what life was like in the “vortex of perdition” all too clearly, and he described the event in detail years later with a certain sense of horror. The pilgrimage symbolized everything that he despised in the worship of the Roman Catholic church: He saw its objective as the misdirected veneration of material objects, and its foundation as a web of fraud, deceit, and priestly avarice.

Farel reports that when he had not yet even learned to read, his family went to the Shrine of the Holy Cross at Tallard, which was not far from his native village of Gap in Dauphiné. This shrine, like countless others throughout Europe, claimed to have some fragments of the true cross of Jesus. It was not a very impressive-looking relic. The two fragments, rough and uneven, had been fashioned into a cross and were trimmed with copper. The metal trim was also an object of veneration, since it was believed to be part of the basin in which Jesus had washed the feet of the apostles.