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Faith
and Culture
As some of you may know, I’m currently in Rome, where I am serving a term as scholar in residence at the North American College, the national seminary for the United States at the Vatican. Just the other day, I had the privilege of taking the “Scavi” tour (Italian for “excavations”) under St. Peter’s Basilica. The pilgrimage was led by James Wallace, a North American College seminarian from Winnetka who is studying for Chicago.
James commenced the tour by gathering our group just outside the basilica on the south side of the building. He pointed to an insignia on the ground that marked the spot where, in the first century, a great Egyptian obelisk stood at the very center of the circus of Nero. This arena, well outside the city walls at the time, was a place where games and races were held, but it was also the setting for some far more nefarious business.
In the wake of the fire which destroyed a great deal of Rome, the emperor rounded up a number of Christians and had them tortured to death in that place. His most prominent victim was the leader of the Christian community in Rome, Simon, the Galilean fisherman whom Jesus had named Peter, the Rock. Peter died, crucified upside down, in that circus of Nero, and therefore it is reasonable to conclude that one of the last things he saw was that huge obelisk — which stands now in the center of St. Peter’s Square.
James explained that Peter’s body was taken down and buried in a shallow grave upon which a few tiles were placed. The spot was remembered by the Christian community and in time a Roman-style cemetery, called a necropolis, a city of the dead, grew up there.
Eventually, a somewhat more elaborate monument was placed over the grave of the chief of the Apostles. When, almost three centuries later, the Roman emperor Constantine became a Christian, he longed to build a church over the tomb of Peter, and the Christians directed him to that very spot on the side of the Vatican Hill. The emperor leveled the ground, filled the ancient necropolis with dirt, and constructed the sanctuary of the basilica on the site of Peter’s grave.
It was not until the 20th century that that city of the dead was unearthed, as Vatican workers were preparing a resting place for the body of Pope Pius who stipulated that he be interred close to the bones of St. Peter. Pius’ successor, Pius XII, urged a team of diggers and archeologists to continue to explore, though to do so clandestinely for fear that Hitler, who had a fascination for religious objects, might get wind of the project.
After much work — digging at night so as not to disturb the pilgrims in the basilica — the team discovered a number of tombs in the necropolis and, finally, the monument directly under the main altar of St. Peter’s. On a wall that fronted one of the sides of this device, they found a group of ancient coded graffiti. An expert in deciphering such writing was called in, and she determined that one of the lines said, “Petros eni” (Peter’s within).
When they looked in, they found a group of bones and some shreds of purple cloth, indicating that those remains were once accorded the highest reverence. A forensic scientist determined that the bones were indeed from the first century and that they belonged to a male between 60 and 70 years old and of a robust, stocky build: a perfect fit.
They were able to fit together much of the skeleton of this man, but there were no traces of his feet. The mystery is cleared up when we recall that they would have cut a criminal down from his cross in the most direct and expeditious way possible.
At the very end of the tour, James allowed us to look at one of the bones that they discovered: the jawbone of St. Peter. As I gazed at this relic, which had lain there under the Vatican Hill for nearly two millennia, I was deeply moved. If this really was the jawbone of St. Peter, it must have trembled as Simon wept tears of self-reproach on Good Friday, and it must have stirred as he declared to the Jews gathered in Jerusalem on Pentecost that the risen Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah.
What the bones of Peter signal to anyone who has eyes to see is that Christianity is not an abstract philosophy or a disembodied mysticism. It is a religion that is grounded in the unnerving historical fact that God became a first-century Jew who walked the hills of Galilee, trod the streets of Jerusalem and befriended a fisherman from Capharnaum named Simon.
Explaining the meaning of the Christian faith, St. John says, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands …” (1 Jn 1:1). That dense realism of the Incarnation was brought home to me with enormous power as I looked upon the remains of Jesus’ friend.
Barron is the Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary.
