R. A. Scotti Read Free Page B

new church. Julius placed them in an opening dug beneath the spot where the foundation stone would fit—a block of marble, “four palms wide, two broad, and three fingers thick”—the first stone of the new Basilica of St. Peter.
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    Looking back across centuries of checkered history, across the lapses in Christianity and compassion, across the bloody crusades and Inquisition, it seems more than happenstance that, of his twelve apostles, Christ chose Peter to lead his new church.
    Simon Peter, so clearly flawed, seemed to be the least among the disciples. He lacked the poetry of John, the curiosity of Thomas, even the boldness of Judas. He was ignorant, impulsive, unreliable, and boastful. He was one of us. He shared our ebullience and our errors. He was the first to swear his undying faith, and the first to fail. The first to volunteer to watch through the night with Christ, and the first to fall asleep. Even after he became the first pope, it was said that Jesus caught him on the Via Appia fleeing from Nero’s dangerous city.
    On the shoulders of this empathetic, eminently fallible man, Christ placed the future of the Church, and the humanity of Peter, that uneasy balance of sinner and saint, has sullied and sustained his Church ever since. A communion of sinners who would be saints, led by the most mortal of men—such is the enduring strength of the Roman Catholic Church. That boundless acceptance of a willing spirit foiled time and again by weak flesh has confounded those who have prematurely prophesied its end, from the unforgiving Luther to the unyielding evangelicals.
    As a historical entity, the Church of Rome is unparalleled. It has operated without interruption for more than two thousand years—no other institution is even a close second. Never a monolith that spoke with a single voice, it always had room for the beatific and the base. At no time in its often unedifying history has it seemed more wanton and wondrous, more earthy and existential than in the era of the Renaissance popes, and no pontiff has embodied those excesses more extravagantly than il Terribilis, Julius Secondo.
    Giuliano della Rovere was elected supreme pontiff of the Church of Rome in a single ballot, having taken the prudent step of crossing the palms of key cardinals with silver. As pope he chose the name Julius, not for the sainted Pope Julius I, but for the original Julius, the conquering Caesar and empire builder who made Rome glorious.
    Now, on the very spot where Peter was buried, the Christian Caesar was building a citadel of faith for God and eternity. The enterprise was audacious, but so were the times. Gutenberg had invented the printing press, Columbus had stumbled on a new continent, and the Renaissance was in full bloom. Before the new Basilica was finished, Magellan’s fleet would sail around the world; Henry VIII would take six wives and dispose of four; Shakespeare would make all the world a stage, the Mayflower would drop anchor off Plymouth Rock, and Europeans would taste chocolate and coffee for the first time.
    But from the foundation stone, Peter’s new house was both a splendor and a scandal. One thousand two hundred years before, the emperor Constantine had raised a shrine to the apostle on the very same ground. To destroy Constantine’s basilica—a hallowed site almost as old as the Church of Rome—was a desecration.
    The scandal that his plan provoked only steeled the pope’s resolve. Julius imagined the new Basilica as the centerpiece of a Christian Rome more magnificent and mighty than the city of the Caesars. And the fact that the original St. Peter’s was the most revered shrine in Europe, the repository of a millennium of sacred history and art, be damned. He would rip it down and replace it with something more immense, immutable. A new edifice for a new age.

CHAPTER TWO
THE FIRST ST. PETER’S
    A ccording to the historian Tacitus, thirty years after