THOU ART PETER
The great dome of St. Peter's is filled with light, making plain the words inscribed in gold within the circle: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram ædificabo ecclesiam meam, et tibi dabo claves regni cœlorum—Thou are Peter the rock, and upon this rock I build My Church, and to thee I give the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Far beneath the dome and bathed in its light, the high altar rises; and under it the Fisherman of Galilee lies buried in the earth—the Fisherman to whom, Saint Matthew's Gospel says, those words were spoken.
The nineteenth century cast the shadow of doubt upon the faith of centuries which had prayed and chanted on this spot a good thousand years before Bramante, Michaelangelo and Bernini began to build. Some said that Peter was not buried here, and also that Paul did not rest under the stones of the Basilica on the Ostian Way. Indeed, had either of them ever come to Rome? Nor (it was thought) could any such saying have ever crossed the lips of Jesus.
Science it entitled to every doubt, but it has also the duty of rendering the most scrupulously accurate verdict to which it can possibly arrive. Faith may well be, in its deepest depths, impervious to attack; but knowledge nevertheless buttresses it with testimony. And today the inscription there in the light of the dome and the tomb in the darkness of the earth are given a new significance by the affirmation of science that a genuine Gospel saying is here placed above the the grave of Peter. Here on Vatican Hill, in the soil of a pagan burial ground on which the ancient Petrine Basilica was erected about 350, rests the disciple who, like Paul, died a martyr's death during the reign of Nero (between 64 and 67). Both were legislators of the Christian community, which had taken form long before its establishment in the metropolis.
These facts constitute the firm points of vantage from which we shall glance at the early history of the Papacy, The roots of this most long-lived of trees rise from out of God's earth far into the spaces of the antique world and dig deep into the soil of centuries.
The Roman Empire of Augustus; time stretched in a northerly direction from Spain to the border of Scotland, and from France across
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