Prayers for Peter

Day 99

Today we got an exclusive look at an area of the Vatican: the catacombs below St. Peters.  The Vatican has a long history, starting as a necropolis with a neighboring circus.  For those who don't know, St. Peter's is situated where it is because it is the most promising site for where St. Peter himself was buried after he was crucified (upside-down) at the circus.  In fact, if you drop a plumb line from the center of Bernini's baldichino inside of the basilica, it would hit Pete's tomb.

So Trinity Rome arranged for us to get a behind the scene's tour of the now buried necropolis beneath St. Peter's.  The place is incredibly well preserved considering how much Constantine destroyed when he built the first church in that place, the questionable excavation techniques of the mid 20th century, and everything else in between.  What really made our tour though was our guide.  Because it is now so miserably hot in Rome, I wasn't paying particular attention when he told us his name, but what I do remember is that he is a seminarian from Manchester who couldn't have been more than a couple years older than me.  He was awesome, cracking jokes at some of the ridiculous things that happened in antiquity (some Romans believed the afterlife would be one giant orgy), in the excavation process (apparently the head archeologist decided to hide a skeleton in his office at one point and tell no one else about it. That skeleton was St. Peter...oops), and during his tours (the most common question he gets asked is why they build the mausoleums underground.  The short answer is they didn't, duh.  Like all the rest of Rome, St. Peter's was built on top of the preexisting structures).

The tour ended after we stood in the single spot you can see St. Peter's bones underneath the basilica.  The entire tour lead up to this moment, slowly building up both the historical evidence of Peter's burial and the excavation of the tomb.  This final moment did not disappoint.

Afterwards I went up into the current Basilica and marveled at how far the Catholic Church has come.  It really is incredible when you consider it.  The Church decided to build its stronghold, its home on a place they believed was holy, but had no material evidence to support this idea for nearly two millennia.  And yet, St. Peter's Basilica is the largest church and perhaps the most spacious building I have ever been in, and that's saying something considering how many churches, basilicas, and cathedrals I've been in.  Everything, even the statues and monuments within seem tiny in comparison to its soaring arches.  All this was built on the hope, on the faith, that a few measly documents were telling the truth.  Though the current evidence absolutely supports in ancient testaments, even if it didn't, how incredible is it that an institution promoting God's love was built on this one piece of faith.

Ciao,
J