November 21, 2002 - page 2

Saturday’s sightseeing was like a whirlwind tour of the history of Christianity. The day started early at St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Any attempted description is out of the grasp of this writer, so I can only tell you that this is the best church in the world. I make that claim confidently and fully cognizant of the fact that there are a lot of churches I have never seen. Completely floored by its size and beauty, I couldn’t believe I had to leave St. Peter’s. It was like I’d been kicked out of heaven.

The disappointment would not linger very long, as the Vatican Museum and Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel sat only a few hundred meters away. The Chapel was a similarly divine place, although the Lord might want to raise the standards for eternal bliss if this many people are going to show up.

Leaving the seat of Christian power and splendor in the Vatican, we journeyed to the opposite extreme of the religion’s history: the subterranean Catacombs just outside the city. Here the earliest Christians, usually poor and landless, dug multi-story mausoleums filled with rotting bones and primitive art. The graves they cut into the walls once held the bones of hundreds of thousands of infants and believers, including several of the first popes and martyrs killed trying to escape Roman persecution.