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.

Peterskirche

You get to learn the dates of many feasts of the Catholic Church when you visit places in Europe. For example, our first day looking around Vienna happened to coincide with the 40th day after Easter, the day of the Ascension. Many of the shops were closed, though the churches were open, but there's only a select few of us that think that churches are interesting enough to make up an entire day's occupation. We're the same group of people who will go google the stories of the saints when we learn to whom each altar in the church is dedicated.

Ooo ooo, I know this one! St. John of Nepomuk! I don't even have to look up how to spell Nepomuk anymore!

But a whole day of trying to find something to do in a city in another country where they don't speak English, where you can't figure out why nothing is open and where you are having extraordinary difficulty deciding what to do for lunch and/or dinner (you're not quite sure what time it is either) on top of travelling to so many different places can do something crazy to a person. You can become quite unreasonably angry with your friend and leave her on the metro back to the hostel while you hop the next train back into the city to sulk.

It was in this rather disquieted state of mind that I magically found my way to St. Peter's Church or Peterskirche in German. I had walked by this church before the last time I was in Vienna, I was sure, and even though I had determined earlier that day that I was going to focus on Stephansdom while I was in Vienna, the bells were ringing the evening mass as I walked by and I figured it couldn't hurt me to go to church. I would just sit down somewhere and write mean things otherwise.

Peterskirche is not a big church. It's baroque and it's impressive with its decoration, but it had already quite filled up by the time I walked in. I had to sit in a chair beside the raised pews with no kneeling rail. This mean that during mass, when I generally play a game of monkey-see, monkey-do with the knowledgable people around me, I couldn't imitate their kneeling. It was still good though, to listen to the congregation chant their way through mass and to contemplate things as I looked around the room, wondering what in the world the sermon could be about.

The confessional booths were open and I had never seen one of these things in action before. The ones in Peterskirche were also new to me because they had these little side nooks that you kneeled at and then whispered yours sins to the priest. Man, I want more privacy than that. If I have to say everything I've done wrong since my last confession, I don't want any chance of that mess getting around (that's what she said... and now I would have even longer of a list). But the booths are distant enough from the main nave, I guess, taking up some wall space in some of the side altars, so I just watched as a mini-priest in the making, a proud middle school boy, made his way over to the booth early on in the service to get those sins off his chest before taking communion. A little line formed, mostly men, though the boy's mother also went over to the booth (is it allowed to go both ways? I feel like moms should be able to get some information from the priest. They're all in cahoots anyway). It's a character study, watching their faces change as they approach confession and after they leave it. And hey, body language was the only thing that was making sense to me at the time.

After mass, the church cleared out but I couldn't bring myself to leave. I mean, I didn't particularly want to look around, because I was still mad and sad and stuff, but the people who stayed to pray had me glued to my seat. OK, this is kinda a lie and this is where I make my decision. Sometimes you just get tired of secularizing everything.

I believe in God. I believe God does mighty and wonderful things in the world today, sometimes through the Church and sometimes not. I believe God hears me when I pray and I believe that He doesn't judge me on the way that my prayers get to Him, so even though I feel a little insolent doing it in one of these fancy churches with enough decorations on the ceiling to scare anyone away from staring intensely at it, I will stare intensely at the ceiling because that's the easiest way for me to focus my attention on the task at hand, and I have found that I can pray for the hour and a half between mass and the evening organ concert and barely notice my butt going numb from the tiny wooden pew that I absconded post-mass.

Because sometimes, God needs to hear it. God needs to hear my confusions and my frustrations as much as He needs to hear my joys and my praises. God needs to hear my confessions and my failings as much as He needs to remind me of my blessings and my suceedings. God needs to hear when I am worried about the Church and He needs to hear what I have to say in praise of the Church. And I couldn't think of a better place to do this than the one I currently inhabited. It also doesn't hurt to send up a prayer or two for people you may or may not have left on metro trains, even though we're both capable adults and the metro stop is stupid close to the hostel. You know, just in case.

Then I let myself get distracted by the room. I'm getting to like the stories churches tell. I like recognizing the altars (St. John of Nepomuk, St. Barbara, St. Michael, St. Anthony).

I like looking at the different ways people choose to portray Biblical figures.

OK, so I don't really know who this is, but isn't that the coolest effect ever?!

 Of course, there's always people in the room. It's impossible not to be slightly miffed by the tourists that forget that you're in a church, that click two photos of the interior and talk too loudly to the people around them before moving on, but this can be countered if, say, a caring husband leaves his pregnant wife waiting patiently at the pews while he goes to fetch a priest to talk about a christening ceremony for the little not-yet-born human that will soon occupy all of their time. Then you can watch as one of the other priests, quicker at changing, comes over to talk to the pregnant wife like they're old family friends and watch the way she reacts, all comfort and smiles and quietly told stories, respectful but happy in the space she's in. You can sit back as the husband comes back, priest in tow, completely focused on getting back to his wife, smiling at her as he approaches. This little scene can give you a good bit of encouragement for the Church, if a place like this, so full of shiny things that they're willing to give you a printed guide at the door to help you sort it out, can still be bothered to do the simple care of a congregation. It can make you smile as you go back to your prayers.

I thumbed through the pamphlet on the objects in the room as I waited the extra half hour for the organ concert to start. The free concert, by the way, was something kinda crazy beautiful. They had singers as well, and they did Ave Maria, which I had done with my youth choir back home and dearly loved and my heart soared for a song I understood. All in all, it was beautiful. But before I got distracted by that, I was distracted by the top paragraph on the back of the pamphlet. "Before leaving, do look again at the painting aboce the main altar.

This work of art (by M. Altomonte) portrays the healing of the lame man by St. Peter and St. John at the Beautiful Gate in Jerusalem. Before you leave the church you might pray for the unity of all Christians. St. Peter's has worked for this goal since 400 AD."

See, the Ascention is when Christ left us all to deal with each other, you know, Love one another as I have loved you, etc. 400 years later, this church began its work trying to make that kind of unity true. It's all good, though. I can't think of a better place to celebrate the beginning of the churches' time together.