The Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican City (pictured), constructed between 1506 and 1626, is one of the holiest sites in Christendom.
The Pope in Rome holds the oldest elected office in the world. In the nearly 2,000 years it has existed, the papacy has helped forge the history of Europe, and has also reflected both the best and the worst of that history. Several popes schemed, murdered, bribed, thieved and fornicated, while others committed atrocities so appalling that even their own contemporaries were shocked.
This was especially true of the darkest days of the papacy’s dark history when Christendom was gripped by a hysterical fear of witchcraft or any dissent from the path of ‘true’ religion as ordained by the popes and the Catholic church. Some of the most heinous crimes ever committed in the name of religion – all of them with papal sanction – occurred during the five centuries or so during which a ferocious struggle raged over Europe to eliminate ‘error’: any belief, practice or opinion that deviated from the official papal line.
Virtual genocide, for example, eliminated the Cathars, an ascetic sect centred around the southwest of France, who believed that God and the Devil shared the world. In 1231, the first Inquisition was introduced to deal with them. Inquisitors used horrific tortures such as the rack and the thumbscrew to extract confessions. The end was often death in the all-consuming flames of the stake. As well as heretics, thousands of supposed witches, wizards, sorcerers and other ‘agents’ of the Devil died in the same horrific way.
In less savage form, the Inquisition caught up with the 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was censured for supporting views about the structure of the Universe that were contrary to Church teachings. Galileo believed in that the Earth orbited the Sun, while the Church taught that the Earth was at the centre of the universe. Galileo ended his life as a prisoner in his own house, and some 350 years passed before the Vatican admitted that he had been right all along.
The Vatican had its own, self-imposed prisoners: the five popes who declined to recognise the Kingdom of Italy and for nearly sixty years refused to leave the precincts of the Vatican. Eventually, in 1929, Pius XI realised that isolation was making the papacy an anachronism and signed the Lateran Treaties that enabled it to rejoin the modern world.
Ten years later, in 1939, the extreme dangers of this modern world were brought home to another Pius – Pope Pius XII – who was confronted with the combatants in World War II, both of whom sought papal sanction for their efforts. Pius XII gave his support to neither, but by following his own path made himself a hero and a saviour to some, but a villain, even a criminal, to others.
To the east of the basilica is the Piazza di San Pietro, or St. Peter’s Square, flanked by 284 Doric columns topped by 140 statues of saints (pictured).