St. Peter's Basilica

Editor's Note: You're stuck with some unfortunate reflections of a personal nature in addition to the expected expounding of history and ideas. Feel free to disagree and correct as needed. Much thanks.

An indulgence is a pardon from time in purgatory, time which is required by God's justice, even though the guilt of the sin is forgiven by God's grace. Indulgences are given by the pope or by bishops or others given authority by the pope, who gets his authority as the successor of St. Peter, to whom Christ gave the keys to the kingdom and the power to bind things on earth that will be bound in heaven. They're given with the caveat that the parishioner who recieves the indulgence does some good work or an act of piety, like going on a pilgrimage or giving to the poor or the building of something for the public good, like, say, a bridge or a church.

It's odd then, to think that in the 16th century, one could use this privilege of the church to simply buy one's way out of purgatory. It strikes me as odd that the people who have the best access to scriptures that speak against greed and the hoarding of fine things and that the religion whose founder turned over seller's tables in the temple because the sellers were abusing a sacred space should then sell a faster ticket to heaven like a museum sells a tour pass that lets you bypass the lines outside. I remember when I first heard about indulgences, unclearly explained by my 10th grade world history student teacher in a rare moment of actual historical instruction. I was amazed that such a thing actually happened. I mean, the issue is always a little more subtle than you have time to cover in class, but to me it sounded like a money-making scheme, something a villian in a noel would do, something entirely unsuited to the church. It just seemed wrong. And what did they need all that money for anyway?

Oh. To build a church. This church, in fact.

Now, I'm not the only one who though there was something off about all this. The sanctioned selling of indulgences to build St. Peter's Basilica as you see it now is one of the things that set Martin Luther off on his 95 Thesis, started the Protestant Reformation and changed the face of Christianity as it was known. Even the Catholic Church itself wasn't left out of this change: the Protestant Reformation started a Counter Reformation that can be seen in the architecture of the time- churches were built to display more wonder and awe, to remind people of the amazing and astounding nature of the God to whom they came to pay homage, to worship. It was a great time of change in the world, with the Renaissance and all sorts of humanist ideas flying around among this era of debate and rupture in the Church.

Knowing all of this should have made walking into St. Peter's a more solemn, momentous moment, one full of conflict about visiting a place with such historical and cultural significance. Or so you'd think. But Sarai and I came down rather suddenly from the climb up to the cupola (definitely worth your while) and stumbled our way into a side door, spilling accidentally and abruptly out into the nave to stand astonished at this massive, beautiful, awesome space.

The nave at St. Peter's can fit most other churches in the world inside of it. It's bigger than the Florence Duomo with its inexpressible size and even if I tried to amaze you with the height and length and width of the church, you would not feel the awe that this space inspires. I made Sarai give me a couple of minutes to walk around by myself because this kind of amazement is not something that I'm particularly good at sharing with other people.

Hold on, let me give you some pictures for a second and some facts in the captions and then we can reconvene to talk about this place.

Michelangelo's Dome, whose top is 448 feet from the floor 

A statue in the nave. That little angel, you know, the one chilling at the bottom? TALLER THAN  A REGULAR HUMAN. 

Baldachin over the papal altar by Bernini. It's the height of a 7 story building.

The orange glow in my picture of the nave was this window. It was two American football fields away from where I took the picture. The dove itself is 6 feet tall.

Now, St. Peter's isn't the cathedral in Rome. I know, you're disappointed, your life is a lie, etc. The cathedral is, as previously mentioned, the seat of the bishop, in this case, the bishop of Rome, or the pope. And the pope's chair in Rome is San Giovanni in Laterano. St. Peter's is just a basilica, or a papal basilica since the pope tends to celebrate mass here when he's around, and a basilica is a church that is given that status because it contains some kind of relic. In this case, it's the tomb of this guy, St. Peter, whom you might have heard of as one of Jesus' closest friends and the first pope, you know, something like that. (I use sarcasm here because I have difficulty dealing with the importance of this spot.) Peter was martyred by that great guy Nero in AD 64, crucified upside down because he didn't think he was worthy to die in the same manner as his Lord, and buried right under where the altar stands in this church.

I was going to tell you about the history of building the church, starting out with the shrine over the burial site of St. Peter, which was originally marked with just a red rock, to the building of Old St. Peter's, started by Constantine, to the original plan for the church, but I figure you can read the wikipedia article just as well as I can. What stuck out to me, though, is when Michelangelo (man, he's just turning out to be my recent favorite of the ninja turtles) took over the design from Bramante & co, he said that he did it to the glory of God and to the honor of the apostle. Over the course of this trip, I've spent a lot of time thinking about why we have these huge churches, why there are these cathedrals. It's not a question I can answer, but I like what Michelangelo said. And if God truly needed a church to explain His glory to the world, though, I would point to this one.



You have saints lining the nave and side chapels with a couple of popes in tombs, so many sculptures to draw the eyes up to the distant ceiling. You can stand at the back and feel the expanse of the church without knowing the height of the distant construction over the papal altar. As you approach it, the canopy looms larger, just barely misaligned with Michelangelo's dome still higher above, truer to the burial place of the saint. There are the accouterments of a church dedicated to such a large fixture in Christianity- a statue of Peter with his curly hair, sitting where his feet can be worn smooth by approaching pilgrims,

 the Cathedra Petri or the throne of St. Peter, encased in bronze and enshrined above the altar in the main apse,

and two meter high letters declaring Peter the rock on which Christ will build the church as you look up towards the dome.

 At the same time, there's a wonderful peaceful dove window above the chair, supported by four church fathers, including two from the Greek tradition. The original plan was a Greek cross with even arms, until the nave was expanded to make a Latin cross. The current design still pays homage to that idea.

The thing is, you've got all of us walking around, made insignificant by the size of this church. You've got people climbing up to the dome- we watched part of a mass being performed in one of the side chapels in the transept from a safe distance on our climb up. You've got people crowding around the Pieta, which is such a wonderful, beautiful piece of sculpture that I had difficulty tearing my eyes from, hidden behind a bullet-proof glass divider.

And all of us, in all this space, what are we doing? You there, with the camera and guide book, do you know the great artists that designed this church? You, walking hand in hand with your mother, do you know who St. Peter was? You, sitting in the chairs in the back of the chapel, do you understand how many people have been here, how many have prayed here? How many popes, leaders of the largest group of followers of Christ on the planet, have been in this very same room as all of us, massive though this room is?

I cannot own this church. I cannot make it mine. I can listen to the telling and retelling of the stories of Peter and I can make the apostle a favorite character in my own understanding of the Gospel. I can love the Pieta and carry the image of the young Mary holding the dead Jesus in my heart and make it an outcry of my own mourning. And I can wonder and marvel at the saints up and down the nave and the dome and the ceiling, so far away, but I cannot own anything except that wonder. This space, this church, could never be a place that I worship the God I understand. It's too big, it's too distant, it's un-understandable for me.

But I can own the feeling of seeing the inside of this place for the first time, that kind of running excitement discovery that steps back when it realizes that this is not a conquerable landscape. (God, what a metaphor for You in my life.) I want to preserve that feeling forever, remembering the few seconds of my life when the things I know about a place didn't matter. Just being there was enough.