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| Traditional Latin Mass in St. Peter's Basilica (Picture by Ashley Hebert) |
[In order to facilitate my narrative, I’m including a plan of
St. Peter’s Basilica which has the most notable features keyed with letters [SOURCE].]
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| "Dominus et Deus meus!" (Picture by Ashley Hebert) |
One mild disappointment, however, was that in the press for
altars to accommodate the many priests wanting to say Mass in St. Peter’s we
had no time to simply pray before that altar once the Mass was over. An attendant shooed us away, back into the
main part of the church. But we then had
time to wander around, soaking it all in – although many of the increasing
throngs of people were not observing the requested “Silence and No Photographs”
in the period before 09:30.
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| Our Roman guide, Roberta |
Our group gathered by Michelangelo’s Pieta just inside the Holy Door [#3] just before 09:30, where we
met our Roman guide for the next two days – Roberta. She was quite good – a perfect balance of
knowledge and piety, better on that count than our previous guides. And our tour began. Once more, it was overwhelming and the press
of time dictated that there was no time to linger and take it all in – the constant
refrain of this pilgrimage. Kind of like
elsewhere, I’m just going to bunch most of my pictures up at the bottom of this
post, but we generally went up in kind of a question-mark from #2, the Holy
Door (opened only during Holy Years and Jubilees), past various shrines,
chapels, and altars – #5, St. Sebastian’s Chapel which now contains the Tomb of
St. John Paul the Great; #7, the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament; #9, the Altar
of St. Jerome, beneath which can be seen the incorrupt body of Pope St. John
XXIII; to #10, the Statue of St. Peter Enthroned, one of the few pieces preserved
from the Old Basilica.
“Old Basilia”? – The “Modern” St. Peter’s Basilica is not the first church on this site. It is a mere five hundred years old, begun during
the later days of the Italian Renaissance on orders from Pope Julius II – a name
we would hear a lot – to replace the original Basilica which was then over a
thousand years old. The quick history
lesson here is that the bulk of the Vatican is on the Vatican Hill, but St.
Peter’s is built on the old cemetery next to it. The Vatican Hill was the site of Nero’s
Circus, where many Christians were martyred in the immediate aftermath of the
Great Fire of Rome, AD 64, which Nero blamed on the Christians. Among those martyrs was St. Peter, famously
crucified upside-down in that Circus and afterwards buried in that cemetery,
which is why the Emperor Constantine almost three hundred years later built the
first St. Peter’s Basilica with its altar directly over the saint’s tomb. The presence of St. Peter’s mortal remains
have been confirmed archaeologically in recent decades, which means that when
Pope Francis says Mass at the Papal Altar, he does so directly over the remains
of his 265th predecessor, a point made by Fr. Chris.
That first Basilica stood for over a thousand years until it was razed
to make way for Pope Julius’ great project, the New St. Peter’s, built between
1506 and 1626. The traditionalist in me
is appalled at the destruction of the first “capital church” of Christendom;
but the result is by all accounts near infinitely more majestic, the high point
of Renaissance architecture.
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| The Papal Altar |
In any case, we continued from the traditional rubbing of the
well-worn foot of St. Peter counter-clockwise around the back of the Papal
Altar – the one with the great spiral-shaped columns, also designed by Bernini –
with a side trip up before #20, the Tomb of Pope Alexander VII; and back around
to #23, the Statue of St. Andrew, bearing his X-shaped cross. Behind that statue we entered a narrow
stairway down into the Holy Grottos beneath the church, where we were asked to
stop taking pictures, which had been allowed freely hitherto – even with flash
which was generally prohibited, because contrary to appearances there are
hardly any paintings or frescoes in St. Peter’s to fade; all of the images are
finely crafted mosaics! We saw the tombs
and sarcophagi of many of the Popes buried beneath St. Peter’s, including (from
a distance) that of St. Peter himself. We
then ascended back into the main body of the church and made our way toward the
front and out, I believe mainly along the left aisle although my memories are
blurred. There was so much to see, and
although I was snapping pictures furiously, I look at many of them now and
think, “I don’t even remember that!” I
am in particularly unsure about that route, because it also seems we emerged
from the Basilica somewhere on the right side!
(If anyone from our group is reading this and can help me work this out,
I’d greatly appreciate it.)
Out of the Basilica, however, we made our way through the
steadily lengthening lines of people waiting to get inside – it pays to be part
of a defined tour group like ours!, and even better to be classified as “pilgrims,”
as we would see later – to a spot just outside the Square, where a photographer
waited to take a group shot. This was
why Alexis had requested that we all wear the Magnificat Travel tee-shirt we
were given on the very first day.
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Front row L-R: Becca Rodriguez; Charlie Vienne; Ethan Wold; Scott
Wold; Dennis Gordon; Jason Methvin; David Stamey; Burley Johnson; Foy Melder; Raymond
Chauvin; Wayne Waguespack; Larry DeBlieux; Kent Hare; Hulen Rodriguez; Buddy
Giering
Row 2 L-R: Manuel Lopez; Nita Doughty; Rosemary
Troquille; Jessica Rodriguez; Linda LaCaze; Sharon Gordon; Christa Rodriguez; Donell
Adams-Welch; Brenda Stamey; Cecile Hymel; Cynthia Johnson; Eva Coleman; Patsy
Melder; Donna Loustaunau; Adele Scott; Jane Chauvin; Anne Hare; Melanie
Johnson; Rebecca DeBlieux; Carol Green; Ashley Hebert; Beverly Giering; Zella
Lopez; Kathy Hollier; Rita Fontenot
Back Row L-R: Roberta (Roman guide); Lisa Johnson; Debra (Italian
escort); Alexis Darbonne (Magnificat representative); Fr. Chris Decker; Fr.
Ryan Humphries
Missing: Rick Johnson; Denise Johnson
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That
took only a few moments, then we were off once again, trekking by foot up and
around the walls of Vatican City for a quarter hour or so, to re-enter through
the street entrance of the Vatican Museums.
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| Since there's too much art to show here, let's settle for our one fleeting glimpse of the Vatican Gardens |
It was now about 12:00, so we took a short break in the
cafeteria area just inside the entrance, then began a warp-speed pass (at least
it seemed that way) through gallery after gallery of artistic masterpieces both
sacred and profane, culminating in the Sistine Chapel. Pictures were allowed until that point [see
below], without flash – but once we entered the Sistine Chapel they were not,
and here the guards enforced that seriously.
They tried enforcing the rule of silencia
as well, but with lesser success. I
later quipped that their admonitions to silence were about as well heeded as
Fr. Ryan’s to the congregants at Immaculate Conception after 09:00 Sunday
Mass! I am proud to say that here again
it was not our group flouting the rules.
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| Laocoön -- where it all began |
Very quickly (as was our tour), the Vatican Museums [LINK] were founded by
Pope Julius II to display an ancient sculpture of the Trojan priest Laocoön and
his Sons that was discovered near the Basilica of St. Mary Major in 1506. It now hosts the vast – and ever-expanding – collection
of artistic treasures held by the Vatican.
It is one of the most visited museums in the world. Its 54 galleries (we saw only a fraction)
culminate in the Sistine Chapel [LINK], famous for two
reasons: 1) the frescoes and paintings
which cover all the walls as well as the ceiling – the side walls, 15th-century
frescoes by Botticelli and others, illustrating the lives of Moses and Christ;
the ceiling being Michelangelo’s early-16th-century depiction of the
Creation (painted before the 1527 Sack of Rome by Lutheran troops in the
Imperial Army of Charles V); and the wall behind the altar by Michelangelo
again, showing the Last Judgment (painted after 1527). [Virtual tour: LINK]
Our tour of the Vatican ended about 14:00 – just two hours in the Museums – and we
scattered for lunch. A group of us ended
up at the Café de San Pietro, right beside Domus Artis, which served
cafeteria-style. Anne and I shared a
vegetable lasagna with mushrooms and a chicken salad; I liked both but she
really cared for neither. Then there was
a little bit of time for more shopping outside Vatican City before we met in
the same location as yesterday, outside Domus Artis, at 15:15, to make our way
to where faithful Luigi waited with the bus to take us to another of the Major
Basilicas of Rome.
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| The Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls |
I must say that of those four Major Basilicas, I found
something particularly enchanting about the Basilica
Papale di San Paolo fuori le Mura – St. Paul Outside the Walls – so named
because it was for long outside the walls of Rome. It presents an almost un-churchlike
impression at first glance, and looks distinctively out of place. I think it is the one of the four Major
Basilicas that was said to best preserve the basic structure of an old Roman
basilica. With the palm trees in the
front courtyard and the golden shimmer of mosaics on the façade, it put me in
mind of something out of the Caribbean.
I cannot in any way agree with the assessment of the DK Eyewitness Travel: Italy 2014 that it is “soulless” (p.
446). DK would have done better not to qualify their framing statement
that it “is a faithful … reconstruction of the great 4th-century
basilica destroyed by fire in 1823.”
True, what we see here is mostly a modern construction, but most of the
buildings in Rome have suffered severe damage and reconstruction over the
centuries. In this case, my
understanding is that it was mainly the nave of the ancient 4th-century
church founded by Constantine over the tomb of St. Paul – not the site of his
martyrdom, as is sometimes alleged, but rather some two miles away where his
body was entombed (with recent excavations confirming the presence of a
sarcophagus beneath the altar, one side of which is now visible through a small
window in the crypt) – that was destroyed, with the eastern end suffering much
less damage. In any case, considered as
a whole, this church has seen much history, Constantine’s church being
continually expanded, eventually coming into the care of Benedictine monks
(maybe that’s why I like it?), being fortified in the 9th century
against Saracen raids, becoming a Cluniac house in the 10th century
(with Cardinal Hildebrand serving as abbot in the mid-late 11th
century before his election as Pope Gregory VII), and serving as the seat of
the Latin Patriarch of Alexandria from 1215 to 1964.
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| The three most recent Popes |
Again, our time was all too short – especially for those of us
who like to try to pick up guide-books and the like in the gift-shops that
inevitably serve as the terminus of these tours – but by 17:30 we were loaded
up and headed back to the hotel. That
did give us a little time in the locale of one of the prime shopping districts
in Rome, just a couple of streets from our own Via Cicerone, the Via Cola di
Rienzo, and we put it to use exploring that area. Dinner was at 19:30, once again followed by
no sharing session – apparently the hotel wasn’t that cooperative in providing
a room for us to engage in that, to the disappointment of no one whom I talked
to. We instead put the time after dinner
to use in a … you guessed it … gelato
run. I think we all felt somewhat
liberated knowing that the wake-up call the next morning would not come until a
luxurious 07:00! [Sat 01 Nov 17:57]
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More Pictures from St. Peter's, the Vatican Museums, and St. Paul Outside the Walls
St. Peter's Basilica
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| (From Ashley Hebert) The mosaic above the altar where we heard the Traditional Latin Mass |
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The Vatican Museums
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| (Better view from Jason Methvin) When I saw Our Lord's expression, I leaned to Alexis from Magnificat and said, "He's saying, 'But the US Bishops said I could stay until Sunday!" |
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St. Paul Outside the Walls
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