St. Paul's Outside the Walls

So there's four big churches in Rome you're supposed to see. There's St. Peter's Basilica, clearly,  San Giovanni in Laterano, the actual cathedral of Rome, Santa Maria Maggiorie, the biggest of the churches devoted to St. Mary in Rome, and finally, Basilica Papale di San Paolo fuori le Mura, or, as most of us will call it, St. Paul's Outside the Walls.

St. Paul's...

And the walls it is outside

Now St. Peter's is actually in Vatican City, so it's not technically in Rome, I guess. San Giovanni in Laterano is down the way from Santa Maria Maggiorie, 'cause I walked there, following the pope (details to come), but both of them are maybe fifteen minutes from the Colosseum, which is pretty distant from the Vatican. Walkable, but distant. St. POtW, as I will now call it, due to sheer sloth, is like, the next to last metro stop on that line or something ridiculous. It's not outside of Rome, but it is outside the walls built by Aurelius and the dude who came after him, and was damaged when the Sarcens (Arabs) invaded Rome in the 9th century. Thank you, wikipedia. Also, thank you to Hank Green for amusing me on my planned recovery days and teaching me the correct pronunciation of wikipedia at 1:40. (Though not the correct spelling of communication. One year of that.) The point of all that discussion is to show you that it takes a little bit of effort to hop around to these places. Rome is full of churches and I didn't get to see all of them by any stretch of the imagination. Good thing I chucked coins in the Trevi Fountain like no one's business.

I got to take a great picture of the hall, as there was no one around. It's too far, I guess. Sorry this picture has nothing to do with the Trevi Fountain.

St. POtW is a basilica like St. Peter's and like St. Peter's, it holds the remains of an important apostle. Down the stairs between the papal altar and the hall of the basilica you can see the tomb of St. Paul, along with chains that held him at some point in his ministry, which was a wow moment for me. I mean, Paul was the apostle to the gentiles and his letters make up a sizable portion of the New Testament, correctly attributed and otherwise. So even though St. Paul's has an astounding hall like St. Peter's and a large papal altar like St. Peter's, the thing that impressed me the most had to be seen kneeling in front of a tiny square or light.

Here, before I ramble, let me show you a picture I found really funny and then you can close out the post, because the rest of it is just a rambling story. It's a difficult habit to break.

Here's Jesus, with Peter and Paul beside him...

And a really freaky old man beetle getting ready to bite his oddly shaped big toe!

I have this terrible tendency to wander into churches right before a mass happens. I mean, maybe it's not a terrible tendency, and part of it is that I'll do the dome climb for places at the last minute, which means I'm near the top during mass, but beyond that, I just end up in a church at the right (?) time. (I was going to say wrong, but it doesn't do to call the time for mass wrong.) But this time, it was not my fault, as a special mass had been called. Now, I always kinda internally giggled when churches had signs saying that you could schedule your own mass as long as you brought your own priest. It gave me this mental image of someone pulling a priest out of a suitcase saying something like, "Thanks goodness we didn't forget the priest!"

It makes a lot more sense when it's, say, an American Catholic youth group going on a pilgrimage. I sat down in some chairs away from the benches in front of the main altar when I saw people starting to gather since I hadn't looked around all I wanted to and I always like sitting through mass, despite the obvious and frequent language barriers. I was surprised and relieved when the head priest started talking in English and sat through a pretty pleasant service. It was good to actually understand a sermon for once.


Well, I say 'understand.' They were celebrating St. Paul's mass (that could be a total lie, Catholic friends- I'm just going off of what I remember the guy saying) which made sense, since, you know, St. Paul was right there, but the sermon surprised me. He talked a lot about believing in the church, which I'm all for. I support faith in an organization that has great potential to bring good and wonderful things into the world at the base level, and I believe that the Church can be a balm to the world around us, providing inspiration and courage. So I am all for believing in the church, regardless of denomination or creed. But then he said that the church had always been and will always be a source of complete truth for anything you'll ever need.

And I, being terrible at hiding my emotions, sat up and gave the preaching priest a look that I don't think I've sent anyone since an evangelical Christian had the audacity to condemn all scientists in my hearing, in front of a group of trusting children without access to auxiliary views. I feel like I need to bring the increduosity for other people. Yes, I think that the church is a great source of truth in the world. But I don't know that you can trust any human organization as purely as he was implying. And I hate to bring up a resolved example, but in his own time, Galileo was subjected to the church's error. The church can be wrong. All churches can be wrong, and have been wrong. I didn't think people advocated for an infallible organization anymore.

I mean, it's good for youth today to hear a vote of confidence for the church. And the rest of it rang out like a normal youth group sermon, with a wonderful fresh outlook for me on the good of a pilgrimage, though with the ever irksome insistence on girls guarding their affection and boys guarding their eyes. After the mass was over, I took pictures of side altars and headed out of the church, snapping more photos of giant statues and the facade. A service in English made me think again about how much I depend on words to make a service worthwhile for me. It also made me think about how much I analyze every word thrown my way.

Then again, I also analyze every word of Paul's thrown my way as well. Makes me wish I had a better way of thanking him than picking apart goodhearted texts.

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.

Basilica San Marco

Would you hate me if I didn't write a long blog post about St. Mark's? Because it didn't really do anything for me. I got lost and walked in the wrong end of the building because it's right by the Patrician's palace and that has a huge museum that I walked around in FOREVER before making it to the line and then I kinda sorta ducked under the ropes because no one was around to tell me where to go and I just figured I'd head in and they got the couple that came in before me because they had a backpack but I just had my purse so I slipped in with this tour group and then wandered around inside except there's not much to see because all the interesting stuff, even one of the side altars, cost money and I was spending entirely too much on my hostel to pay money for some other treasury that I didn't want to see and it was dark and big and gold, which I think fits the city- you know, pretty and rich, but you don't feel like you could live here- and they didn't even allow pictures inside, not to mention that the guards were super intimidating, and anyway, I needed to find the church that they had in the Last Crusade, because clearly I have a one track mind when it comes to things in Venice and that one track does not involve keeping up with the time so that my friend isn't stuck outside reading her book and waiting on me (man, are cellphones useful things) while it could, potentially be raining.
Also, the entrance to the church is on ramps because the city floods at high tide.

And there are pigeons.

Here, to make it up to you, I give you a string of picture of churches and a cute little girl holding pigeons, which is the thing to do in San Marco Piazza.

This is actually the side of San Marco.

Front of San Marco.

Indiana Jones Church! San Barnaba. 

See, isn't she precious? Wasn't it worth it for this?

I just can't help myself. I love this lion.

Also, gondoliers.

St. Vitus Cathedral and St. George's Basilica

As a warning, I'm not entirely sure how I want to go about sharing the churches I see. It's almost always a pretty safe assumption that people aren't going to want to read anything about churches, and the pictures tend to get repetitive. Any time I walk into a place, I have an internal monologue commenting on every aspect of the place. Some of it's funny to me, because you've got to laugh at some things. Some of it's not, so my second strategy was to talk about the architecture and the decorations of the building. And even though I might be fascinated by the difference in this depiction of Mary or that crucifix or the construction of this nave (none of which I can talk intelligently about... yet....), I'm going to guess that you won't be. My other strategy was to find a story for each place and recount that, along with pictures, because every place has a story, but not every place is willing to tell that story. So what follows will be a combination of all of the above.

Prague Cathedral, or St. Vitus Cathedral, is situated entirely in the Prague Castle complex. Now, a cathedral is different from a church not necessarily in the architecture but in the fact that it is the seat of a bishop. So it's a bit interesting right there in that the cathedral is inside the castle. Construction was started in 1344, over the site of the original church founded in 925 by St. Wenceslaus of Christmas carol fame.Turns out he was a prince of Bohemia. There's a Wenceslaus chapel in the cathedral where the crown jewels of Bohemia are kept behind a door with seven different locks that have seven different keys, one of which is held by the Czech president, but the chapel was closed. Construction on the cathedral was halted before the west end and towers were finished, due to the Hussite Wars and the Thirty Years' War. The west end and towers were finished in the 20th century using the plans of the original architect, Peter Parter. Not Peter Parker, like I originally read. Spiderman has no place in cathedrals, except maybe to swing from spire to spire.

Now if it were Batman...

It's a Gothic cathedral, so it's very pretty and very cold. There are high, vaunted ceilings and dozens of side chapels and, when I was there, many tourists and school groups. I naturally went to my right once I stepped inside and looked in a chapel whose description was in Czech, with a small boy smiling for a picture in front of a statue of Mary. To my left, a goodhearted guard was shooing children away from the exit sign and smiling as they ran off to find their parents. In a space full of so many people to be distracted by, it's hard to be overwhelmed with the grandeur of it all.

The church is like most other western Gothic churches in that it's got a long rectangle in the middle with the door at one end and the altar at the other. The main nave is separated from the side chapels with columns and side aisles. There is a division between the wooden pews in the nave and the altar in the chancel of the church called the transept. Statues hang from the columns and the left side opens up to the organ, which is ornate enough on its own, while the right opens to a door out to the courtyard, I think. The pulpit (and I cannot get over how ornate the pulpits are) is raised and on the left before the altar. The main altar itself is pretty unassuming compared with the rest of the architecture, though it is decked out in lilies. Behind the altar is a huge construction, which I'm learning is common, to draw the eye to the altar and the front of the cathedral

Around the back of the main altar (which is called the retr-ochoir- bam church architecture knowledge!) is the tomb of St. John of Nepomuk.

While I was walking around this crazy ornate tomb with curtains and red and white drapings, one of the ladies walking around in front of me said, "Ridiculous." I mean, I almost have to agree- there are kings in the side chapels with less show for their tombs. This man acquired sainthood after being martyred by drowning- he was tossed off a bridge by the king of Bohemia for not revealing the secrets of the confession of the queen of Bohemia and earned his spot as a strong supporter of rebellion against crazy governing figures and the sanctity of confession. So decorate the tomb as you will. The woman went a little red in the face and backpedaled when she saw the man walking behind me kneel and cross himself, offering a short prayer.

I was really excited to go down in the crypt, where you can see not only dead people but also the layers of the building of the cathedral, but it was closed. On the bright side, I did get to see this awesome lion holding a candle, so there's that.

I am a lion. Holding a candle. I do not find this ironic.

Also in Prague Castle is St. George's Basilica. I wasn't expecting to see two things in one day, as I've tried to take it easy on my schedule, but hey, why not. When there's a basilica to see, there's a basilica to see. Now, basilicas were the Roman meeting halls back in the day, with a big wide meeting space and generally an aspe (Bam! Church architecture term again!), which is a curved section with a semi-dome, at the end away from the entrance. But a building can also be designated as a basilica by the pope if it houses a relic or the remains of a saint (or so wikipedia tells me), so even though this building is done in the Gothic style, which is different from the Roman style from whence basilicas came, it can still be called a basilica. St. George's Basilica was built by in 920 Vratislaus I of Bohemia, father of Wenceslaus, who was killed fighting the Magyans (or, more commonly but less fun to say, the Hungarians). The structure that's there today was redone after a fire.

Up in the corner, there's a chapel dedicated to Ludmila of Bohemia, the grandmother of Wenceslaus who acted as regent for him when his father died and who was strangled with her own veil by Wenceslaus' mother, jealous of his grandmother's influence on the child. She was also married to the first Christian Duke of Bohemia, so I quite think she deserves the chapel. Vratislaus is buried in the crypt beneath the basilica.

I don't have a good picture of the chapel, but look, it's Gothic! It's got a pointed arch on the window!

The basilica has a little side rooms, one of which has a statue of Mary holding Jesus after his crucifixion, but neither Jesus nor Mary have any heads, so it's hard to tell.

In the opposite room, there's a little bit of history about the basilica, and you can find out the head abbess associated with this basilica had the right to crown the queen of Bohemia. Fun facts all around.

I liked the basilica. It was quiet, with many fewer people than the cathedral, and you could almost sit down to pray. There wasn't an altar up, since there was a concert planned there that evening, and the ceiling wasn't high and vaunted, just simple and wooden. At the same time, I like my altars and I like my high ceilings. It helps me focus when I'm in a service. And though I love music, a church set up for a concert is not the same as a church set up for worship. So I guess for me, to make a space seem like a church, it has to be built like a church, look like a church and have people in it who are acting like a church, which might be why it's so much easier for me to see God in an empty sanctuary. But it's good to learn the history of these buildings and to see and feel their beauty and space. Of course, these are not the end of my church-related adventures in Prague. More to come!