Image credit: BramArt

"Behold, I Make All Things New"

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?

--G.K. Chesterton

Yesterday evening, I visited St. Peter's with a Protestant friend of mine attending the architecture program. We were looking (it turned out in the wrong place) for the Daughters of St. Paul bookshop and ended up visiting the Libreria Ancona on Piazza Pio XII to pick up a pocket Catechism and a New Testament for a theology class. Since we were probably a scant hundred yards or so from this umbilicus mundi of Catholicism, and my friend had never visited the Vatican, I persuaded her and some of those accompanying us to go in and see St. Peter's.

Catholics, as I have said before, are all-too-familiar with the Basilica. Our images of it are set by the time we gain the age of reason by tiresome repetitions of it in textbook, art books, and television. To my Protestant friend, equally unaware of Catholicism and its detractors, our visit came as a glorious surprise. It proved infectious.

St. Peter's is a realm of delightful unexpectedness. It isn't just novelty, but the sheer size and weight of this universal, cosmopolitan, cosmic institution envelops you like the whirling baroque shroud of blazing pophyry inlay that drapes the tomb of one of the Chigi popes. Luck, or perhaps Providence, was on our side, as we reached the Arch of the Bells as the clocks struck six and the Swiss guards on duty changed the watch with the Germanic bark of orders and the clank of halberds and partizans. We lingered in the narthex for some time, my friend overwhealmed by the beauty of it all. Even the seemingly-simple but ornate coffers on the ceiling which I had mentally brushed aside, too familiar with the baroque and too familiar with St. Peter's, fascinated her.

We moved through the aisles the vast marbled basilica for almost an hour, my commentary occasionally broken by her own reactions of mingled familiarity and surprise. Even to me, my mind steeped in florid tales of incorrupt saints and levitating friars, her excitement made this familiar place seem exotic and blissfully foreign. I remembered to look around as well as lecture. She was full of questions, wondering why we kissed St. Peter's foot or the significance of the baldachino or why Blessed Pope John was miraculously preserved in his glass sarcophagus. It was a place of the senses, filled with light and colors and the omnipresent odor of incense, a much heavier, more solid religion than we often encounter back in the United States. It was marvelous.

We could hear chanted prayers coming from the apse under the billowing gilt of the Throne of Peter, and found ourselves amid a vast crowd of pilgrims hearing the end of Mass from the altar there. Six candles burned in the choir, while ranks of priests in white surrounded the foreign bishop presiding from a cathedra and folding lectern far beyond.

The organ sounded, and a procession wound its way from the altar, acolytes in black and white followed by knights and ladies of the Holy Sepulchre with scarlet crosses marked on their shoulders. Then dozens of deacons and priests, and finally a bishop all in gold flanked by his two dalmaticked assistants, huge tassels swinging at their backs. Behind them loomed a huge sedia borne up by eight priests in chausibles beating a smoke-darkened statue of the Virgin swathed in purple velvet, crowned and studded with stars. It was something out of a novel, a baroque painting, both primitive and incomparably complex, the Virgin's face as dark and chthonic as an antique sibyl's, the priests clothed in white out of the Book of Revelation. It was strange and unfamiliar; but it was always what I had dreamed about. I had come home and discovered a new continent in the process.

Perhaps my friend thought it was pagan, supersititious, bizarre. But her face never told me that. If she thought it was heathen, she clearly thought it was strange and glorious as well. And I am glad that I was there; not to preach or praise, but simply to drink the vast sacramental banquet in with my eyes.