Chair of St. Peter
Have you ever wondered why the center of the Church is geographically located in Rome instead of maybe Jerusalem, which was the center of the events of Jesus’ life? Well, it has to do with the Feast we celebrate today and the Gospel reading we heard just read.1
The Feast of the Chair of St. Peter commemorates Jesus choosing Peter (and his successors) as the pastor of the whole Church when Jesus says: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.”2 We associate Rome with St. Peter because Scripture tells us that after the angel helps Peter escape from prison in Jerusalem, Peter travels to the West where he eventually establishes the Church in Rome.
And it was for the Church that Peter became a martyr. To his executioners, Peter requested that he be crucified upside down because he did not feel worthy to die in the exact manner as Our Lord. And this fact is crucial in understanding the geographical significance of the Church in Rome. Hundreds of Christians where martyred in Rome during the early persecutions and their bodies were quickly buried in the cover of night in graves along a nearby hillside by fellow Christians. It was common to chop off the hands of those who had been crucified in order to get them down from the cross faster. And in the case of St. Peter, whose crucified body hung upside down, in their rush, the Christians cut off his feet to take him down and quickly bury him in the hillside pagan cemetery before they were detected. They dug a grave with no special markers to keep the location secret so the grave would not be desecrated. His remains “remained” buried on that hillside for many years.
During those years, Christians in Rome became more affluent, so they were able build a mausoleum-type monument over the grave of St. Peter but without any specific Christians markings so as to blend in with the other pagan monuments in the cemetery (because the Church was still being persecuted). During that time, Christians would make pilgrimages to the gravesite and would lower long strips of cloth into the opening of his tomb. The cloth was intended to touch the bones or relics of St. Peter and themselves become second class relics to encourage the devotion of the early Christians.
It wasn’t until around the year 313 that Christians were free to openly practice their faith, under the rule of the Emperor Constantine, who himself was a covert to Christianity. Constantine didn’t think it was fitting for the great Peter to be buried in a pagan cemetery and so he wanted to build a basilica over Peter’s tomb. So he gave the pagan families one year to remove their deceased from the cemetery. Then he built a marble encasing around the monument over Peter’s tomb and leveled the hill, burying the remaining graves and the marble encasing that housed the monument of Peter’s grave. Constantine built the basilica on that leveled site, the altar of the basilica set over the tomb buried in the ground underneath. That was in the 4th century. Twelve hundred years later, in the sixteenth century, the basilica fell in such disrepair, that a new basilica was built, the one that we know as St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The new altar sits a story above the original altar built by Emperor Constantine.
In 1939, Pope Pius XI requested to be buried in a crypt located under St. Peter’s Basilica. So an excavation began under the basilica to discover the actual buried tomb of the apostle Peter. They found the buried monument and when they open the grave, inside it was found the skeletal remains of three different people—a woman and two young men. Archeologists and scientists were baffled…until they noticed that one of the walls of the burial monument had a hollow chamber. This hollow wall was lined inside with marble with an inscription that translates “Peter is within.” There were bones inside this secret chamber that scientific testing revealed to belong to one person, a robust man who had been 60 to 70 years old. Every single bone of this man was accounted for, even the smallest phalanges of his hand…except all of the bones of his two feet were missing. The bones had dirt matching the dirt from the original grave. Moreover, there were hundreds of deteriorating thin strips of cloth inside the secret chamber, which must have been from those early pilgrims who came to the monument and lowered those cloth strips to touch the relics but ended up falling inside. The early Christians under persecution, fearing that Peter’s tomb would be desecrated if discovered, placed other people’s bones in the “decoy tomb” while securing the actual bones of St. Peter in the wall of the monument…where they remain still today, underneath the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica.
I went through this “CSI”/cold case-esque explanation of the Chair of St. Peter because it is natural for us as Roman Catholics to love Rome and the successor of Peter. Rome is the center, the geographical heart of the Roman Catholic Church…and the seeds of this love can be traced back more than two thousand years ago when our loving Lord promised to Peter: “On this Rock, I will build my Church.” In many ways, this prophecy has unfolded in divine providence. Rome is the foundational heart of the Church; it is the doctrinal heart of our faith. And over the course of two thousand years, the Church has cooperated with providence and grace to fulfill the literal words of this prophecy. The Chair of Peter is spiritually, doctrinally, and yes physically built upon St. Peter, the Rock.
1 Matthew 16:13–19.
2 Matthew 16:18.
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