The enormous basilica exploded in flame, the sudden brightness like a new sun replacing the one that had set behind it only minutes before.
Though ‘exploded’ was not quite the right word. There was no roiling boom, no shaking of the earth or the structure of the building itself. No walls rattled or fell, and no windows shattered, launching stained-glass particles out over the surrounding streets. There was no whoosh, no bang – the church was simply, suddenly, alight in a strange, ethereally blue fire.
For twenty seconds the fire glowed that strange, supernal colour. The whole basilica was enveloped in the blue tongues of its surprising appearance. But then flame did what flame always does: it consumed. Its heat grew and the unnatural blue turned a more earthly orange and began to char its way through wooden rafters, to melt leaden window casings, and to splinter and crack windows which at last fractured and fell. Sixty seconds after it had spontaneously begun, the Archbasilica of St John in Lateran was an enormous tower of fire.
Not far away, across the city, the same thing happened to the ancient, though significantly smaller, edifice of Chiesa del Domine Quo Vadis – the famed church built on the spot where Christ had caught Peter fleeing persecution, querying his cowardice and turning him back towards the swords and crosses. The flames appeared suddenly over the whole structure which stood at the gateway to the ancient Appian Way, glowed an unearthly blue, then consumed it.
And it happened, too, at the famed ruins of the Terme di Caracalla, the ancient baths that had been in use up until the nineteenth century. And at the convent of Suore Dorotee, with its orange chapel standing cosily beyond low stone walls. All four revered structures, all simultaneously. In the twinkling of a single eye.
It would take some time for a news helicopter flying high above to provide the images to confirm it, but somehow the whole populace seemed to know, even before the photographs came, that these four sites were not random. Some felt the warnings they had received had come by a supernatural power; others that they were a hoax. But they were all convinced that it was part of a plan – somebody’s plan. That the events around them, including this one, were happening with purpose.
From above, the lines between them traced the shape of a perfect cross, laid out over the city, with St John Lateran at the top of the central line.
Just as they knew it would.
Just as the prophecy had said it would.
‘And in the fourth place, a cross of fire shall consume their holy things, the seat of the Mighty See at its head.’