Friday, June 19, 2009

Day 9 highlights: The rock on which the church was built

19 May marked the start of our final Eurotrip destination: Rome, Italy. This city's major difference compared to London and Paris is the weather. I knew that Rome would be hotter because it’s lower south, but I didn’t expect it to be as freakin’ hot as Singapore!

Anyway, gripes about the weather aside, Rome is truly a charming city that’s steep in history and culture. I could literally stand at any one spot in Rome and imagine the same city 2,000 years ago… (Well actually, with ancient ruins forming such a big part of the cityscape, it’s hardly difficult to imagine.)

One of the main reasons for coming to Rome was to visit St Peter’s Basilica. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was our first (and only) highlight for Day 9. Of course, as you’ll learn in the upcoming entries, this won’t be the only time we visit Vatican City…

Anyway, Hil planned the itinerary for Rome so for the most part, I just followed and took in the sights and sounds as they unfolded before me. Our first location in Vatican City was somewhere deep, dark, and cool. A necropolis, I soon learnt, is a large cemetery, usually of an ancient city, and a catacomb is an underground cemetery consisting of chambers or tunnels with holes for graves.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t take pictures as we made our way to the tomb of St Peter buried under the basilica itself, so here's a map of the Vatican Necropolis instead. I think we started from point A and made our way north to point P where St Peter’s tomb laid...

Source: http://www.saintpetersbasilica.org/Necropolis/Scavi-map.htm

And here's an extract of a book written by a Catholic theologian called George Weigel, about his experience in the scavi (excavations). I decided to post it here because I think it beautifully sums up my own experience and reflections of the place:

“The passageways are narrow and slightly musty, even dampish. As we make our way through the dark corridors that were once streets and alleys in the Vatican Hill necropolis, our guide points out the elaborate pagan funerary monuments as well as Christian tombs…

The scavi are more than excavations; if we take them seriously, the scavi demand that we think through the meaning of an extraordinary story involving some utterly ordinary people. Here it is. Sometime in the third decade of the first century of the first millennium of our era, a man named Simon, whose father was named John, made his modest living as a fisherman in Galilee — which, even by regional standards, was a pretty rough patch of what was itself a fringe of the "civilized world." This man, Simon, became a personal friend of Jesus of Nazareth. Through that encounter, he became not Simon but Peter, the rock. But not for a while yet.

His friend Jesus called him "Peter," a wordplay on "rock," but the newly minted Peter hardly seems granitelike in the pre-Easter sections of the Gospels. He is impetuous; he often doesn't understand what Jesus is saying. No sooner does he get his new name than he starts telling Jesus that he, Jesus, is flat wrong when he says that the promised Messiah of God must suffer; Jesus calls him a "Satan" and tells him to "get behind me" (Matthew 16:13-23). When Jesus is arrested, Peter insinuates himself into the courtyard near where his master is being interrogated. But when challenged to acknowledge that he, too, was with Jesus the Galilean, Peter starts cursing and denies that he ever knew the man. The Gospels do not suggest that Peter was present at the crucifixion; they do tell us that, after his denial, he "went out and wept bitterly" (Matthew 26:69-75).

For more than nineteen hundred years, pilgrims from all over the world have come to venerate this man's remains. Why? Catholicism does not rest on a pious myth, a story that floats away from us the more we try to touch it. Here, in the scavi, we're in touch with the apostolic foundations of the Catholic Church. And those foundations are not in our minds. They exist, quite literally, in reality. Real things happened to real people who made real, life-and-death decisions — and staked their lives — not on stories or fables but on what they had come to know as the truth. Beneath the layers of encrusted tradition and pious storytelling, there is something real, something you can touch, at the bottom of the bottom line of Catholic faith…”

If you want to read his entire article (and I strongly suggest that you do), click here.
If you want a more elaborate tour of the Vatican Necropolis, click here.

Another rock of the church, Pope John Paul II, whom most of us were privileged to have seen while he was alive, laid less than 100 feet from St Peter’s tomb. Seeing the tomb of our beloved Pope was a special moment for me. My eyes welled up when I looked at the marble slab and I suddenly remembered telling myself on his funeral day in 2005, that I’ll make the trip to St Peter’s Basilica to see him one day. I’m glad that day had come.