A new, explosive claim is shaking the Catholic community to the core: the long-searched-for Holy Grail is sitting in a church in Spain! 

According to The Huffington Post, two experts in the field -- León University medieval history lecturer Margarita Torres and art historian José Manuel Ortega del Rio -- claim that the artifact known as the Infanta Doña Urraca, located in the Basilica of San Isidoro in León, is the Holy Grail. They make their claim in their book, Kings of the Grail, which was published last week.

Since the claim was made public, the church has been overrun with pilgrims, historians, and skeptics alike. 

In their book, Torres and del Rio make the following explosive claim: "In 2011, two medieval Egyptian parchments were discovered that mentioned the chalice of Christ, saying it was taken from Jerusalem to Cairo. From there, records show that an emir in Muslim Spain received it as a reward for helping the Egyptians during a famine. Finally, it arrived in Christendom in the 11th century after being presented to King Fernando as a gift."

But according to KTVU, the cup has been in Spain since the 11th century. And while scientific proof definitively shows that the proposed Grail was made between 200 BCE and 100 BCE, scientists can't determine where the proposed Grail has been for the first 400 years of its creation. This, of course, calls the whole claim of the Holy Grail into question. 

The story of the Grail and of the quest to find it became increasingly popular in the 19th century, referred to in literature such as Alfred Tennyson's Arthurian cycle the Idylls of the King. The combination of hushed reverence, chromatic harmonies and sexualized imagery in Richard Wagner's late opera Parsifal gave new significance to the grail theme, for the first time associating the grail -- now periodically producing blood -- directly with female fertility. 

The high seriousness of the subject was also epitomized in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting, in which a woman modelled by Jane Morris holds the Grail with one hand, while adopting a gesture of blessing with the other. A major mural series depicting the Quest for the Holy Grail was done by the artist Edwin Austin Abbey during the first decade of the 20th century for the Boston Public Library. Other artists, including George Frederic Watts and William Dyce, also portrayed grail subjects.