Q&N: The Fisherman’s Tomb (John O’Neill)

from
The Fisherman’s Tomb
by
John O’Neill
with Sarah Wynne and Katie Clark

The Fisherman’s Tomb The True Story of the Vatican’s Secret Search Copyright © 2018 by John O’Neill
Note (Hal’s): Chronologically, this story ranges over reigns of multiple Popes. Conflicts bearing on it include internal Catholic politics, issues between Catholic and anti-Catholic religion, differing and evolving approaches to archaeology — and the survival and continuing mission of the Catholic Church in Rome during the rise of Italian fascism and World War II. — end note
Chapter One: The Visit
February 11–14, 1939
The tradition further related that 250 years after Peter’s death, Emperor Constantine had built the first St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as a memorial to Peter directly over his grave. Secret excavations by the Church in 1513 and 1683 to verify the truth of the long-standing tradition found only pagan graves, however, and the Church abandoned any further effort to find Peter. While the burial place of Peter is a pious tradition and not a matter of faith, the Church — facing the pressures across Europe, especially in the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation — feared unnecessarily rattling the dearly held beliefs of the Catholic faithful.
Chapter Three: Peter
If the physical remnants of Peter’s presence and death in Rome could be found, it would tend to validate numerous Christian and Catholic beliefs. It could provide the power of archeological and physical evidence to support early Christian writings. On the other hand, if the search failed to find evidence of Peter, it would tend to validate the skepticism of Luther and many others toward the Catholic Church and Catholic accounts of early Christian history in general.
Chapter Five: Vatican Hill
The New Basilica
Pius XII now confronted a difficult decision — namely, whether to continue to excavate under the foundations, possibly proving once and for all that Peter was not buried there, or to cease the digging as in 1626, treating the excavation as if it never happened and sealing any records in the Vatican Library. Pius XII made the incredibly brave decision to pursue the excavation. Unlike the excavators in 1626, Pius XII chose to pursue the truth.
Chapter Six: Pius’s Gamble
The long reign of Rome and the most long-lasting of Chinese and Egyptian Dynasties never reached or barely survived one thousand years. In the entire history of man, only two human institutions approach continuous existence and succession for more than two thousand years: the Japanese Imperial Succession and the papacy.
If Peter never really came to Rome — if he was never really the leader of a Christian community there and never really passed along his authority to a Roman successor — even the pope’s authority and credibility could more easily be called into question. Various prior and small-scale excavations by Pius’s predecessors had totally failed to find Peter. Although they had been conducted in secret, the excavations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had eventually become known to the public, giving critics fodder to cast some doubt on papal legitimacy. Faced with growing skepticism in the twentieth-century world, no doubt exacerbated by the chaos of worldwide war, Pius chose to take one of the great gambles in human history — excavating under the Vatican itself to prove or disprove Peter’s arrival and death in Rome. Although he would seek to keep the excavations secret, he must surely have known that the results would leak out, as with the earlier efforts. Pius’s decision was a strange and wild bet for a man known to be conservative and risk-averse in most every other way. Why? Almost certainly it was no gamble at all to Pius. He had an almost irrational, unwavering faith that Peter was there and would be found.
Chapter Seven: Pope Pius XII and His Team
Early Career
In 1924, while still in Munich, he witnessed the failure of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and predicted that Hitler “was finished” and “would never be heard from again.” In 1945, when the American diplomat Robert Murphy asked Pope Pius XII how his earlier prediction squared with “papal infallibility,” Pius replied, “I was only a monsignor then.”
Chapter Ten: Inside the Tomb
This wall, cut off by later construction, was covered in markings The marks were clearly Roman names and symbols, but they were otherwise unreadable to the Ferrua team, who dismissed the wall as unintelligible and insignificant.
In the rush to find the bronze sarcophagus, Ferrua largely ignored the other human remains the team periodically encountered. The field of forensic study of human remains for historical purposes was largely undeveloped at this time. It probably never occurred to the Ferrua team that the remains themselves could provide valuable evidence. The team ignored Kaas, the project leader, when he urged greater respect for the dead. [...] Kaas, however, would quiely return to the excavation site each day after work, where he would recover and respectfully box the remains that Ferrua and his team had passed over in their hurry. He did so more as a priest than an archeologist. He would then label and date the remains, citing the location where they were found, and give the bones to a workman to place in storage. Ultimately, Ferrua’s blindness to the Graffiti Wall and his indifference to human remains would delay for decades the discovery of the true story of Saint Peter.
Chapter Fourteen: Margherita Guarducci
It was not the dawn of archeology, but it was the morning of that science as a science. Discoverers like Battista Beldoni in Egypt and Heinrich Schliemann of Troy/Mycenae (modern-day Mykonos) fame had popularized the study, but they were as much adventurers as scientists. Their methods were often crude and unscientific, designed to discover wonderful artifacts as treasure hunters and bring them back to great museums like the Pergamon in Berlin and the British Museum in London. They were much less concerned with systematically studying and preserving sites. Kenneth Harl wrote cruelly, but accurately, of the great Schliemann that he had done to the Trojans what the Greeks could not do: destroy their entire city. In the 1920s, science began to replace the treasure hunt for artifacts. Archeologists started using a grid system, accurately surveying and carefully studying, strata by strata, to establish chronological order and gain all the information actually available from an ancient site. Epigraphy, photography, forensic evidence, and, much later, carbon dating and various tools of remote survey became implements of a much more scientific and thorough archeology. Guarducci was deeply committed to the use of these scientific methods and tools to arrive at the truth.
Guarducci in the Necropolis
The Necropolis had originally been sealed by the construction of the first St. Peter’s Basilica in 337, so it was apparent that all inscriptions must predate that. Her first great find was the faded inscription, “In Hoc Vince” — translated, “In this Conquer.” This inscription must have been carved less than eighteen years after Constantine’s victory. It confirmed to Guarducci the story that Constantine and his troops claimed to have seen these words written in the sky with a cross the day before their epic victory at the Milvian Bridge. This fantastic account had come to be widely regarded as a myth invented much later. Yet Guarducci’s discovery provided incontrovertible confirmation that this story had begun to circulate while the witnesses were still alive — it was not a later fabrication.
Chapter Seventeen: Ferrua’s Revenge
On June 26, 1968, Pope Paul VI announced to the world that Peter’s bones had been found, concluding that the bone fragments recovered by Guarducci from the Necropolis had been identified “in a way that we can consider convincing.”* * [...] Lyman, “St. Peter’s Bones Fake?”, citing Lorenzo Bianchi, a leading archaeologist and expert on Church relics, “There are many ways to verify and I suppose there is no way to be 100 percent sure, but from circumstances and records, we can say some specific things about these bones: that they were buried there some time between 114 and 120 AD, that Constantine believed them to be authentic, that other records seem to support that. I think we can be as certain as we can reasonably expect to be about this.”
Chapter Twenty-One: The Great Persecution and Helena
The persecution by Diocletian is commonly called the Great Persecution because of the cruel and widespread slaughter of Christians. Prior to this period, it was an unthinkable crime for any Roman to disturb a grave — even the grave of a criminal, enemy, or Christian. By edict of Valerian and Diocletian, however, Christian graves lost their immunity. The emperors made war on the dead, desecrating Christian graves, ironically in the same way their own tombs would later be destroyed by the barbarians. Faced with this danger, it seems quite likely that brave unnamed Christians moved Peter to the Graffiti Wall niche during this period, leaving the hidden inscription, “Peter is here.” This is one plausible hypothesis for how the bones were moved.
In a nave on the main floor of the Vatican, there is a shrine to Helena with a wonderful statue of her. Ironically, her statue looks and gestures down, as if pointing for centuries to the unknown Necropolis below. We will likely never know the extent of Helena’s involvement in the movement of Peter’s bones. There is symmetry, however, in the idea of brave Helena, consumed with a passion for Christian archeology, preserving Saint Peter’s relics until their discovery 1,600 years later by another strong and brave woman archeologist.
text checked (see note) Jan 2024

The Fisherman’s Tomb
The True Story of the Vatican’s Secret Search

Note (Hal’s):
Chronologically, this story ranges over reigns of multiple Popes. Conflicts bearing on it include internal Catholic politics, issues between Catholic and anti-Catholic religion, differing and evolving approaches to archaeology — and the survival and continuing mission of the Catholic Church in Rome during the rise of Italian fascism and World War II.

— end note

Chapter One: The Visit

February 11–14, 1939

The tradition further related that 250 years after Peter’s death, Emperor Constantine had built the first St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as a memorial to Peter directly over his grave. Secret excavations by the Church in 1513 and 1683 to verify the truth of the long-standing tradition found only pagan graves, however, and the Church abandoned any further effort to find Peter. While the burial place of Peter is a pious tradition and not a matter of faith, the Church — facing the pressures across Europe, especially in the onslaught of the Protestant Reformation — feared unnecessarily rattling the dearly held beliefs of the Catholic faithful.

Chapter Three: Peter

If the physical remnants of Peter’s presence and death in Rome could be found, it would tend to validate numerous Christian and Catholic beliefs. It could provide the power of archeological and physical evidence to support early Christian writings. On the other hand, if the search failed to find evidence of Peter, it would tend to validate the skepticism of Luther and many others toward the Catholic Church and Catholic accounts of early Christian history in general.

Chapter Five: Vatican Hill

The New Basilica

Pius XII now confronted a difficult decision — namely, whether to continue to excavate under the foundations, possibly proving once and for all that Peter was not buried there, or to cease the digging as in 1626, treating the excavation as if it never happened and sealing any records in the Vatican Library. Pius XII made the incredibly brave decision to pursue the excavation. Unlike the excavators in 1626, Pius XII chose to pursue the truth.

Chapter Six: Pius’s Gamble

The long reign of Rome and the most long-lasting of Chinese and Egyptian Dynasties never reached or barely survived one thousand years. In the entire history of man, only two human institutions approach continuous existence and succession for more than two thousand years: the Japanese Imperial Succession and the papacy.

If Peter never really came to Rome — if he was never really the leader of a Christian community there and never really passed along his authority to a Roman successor — even the pope’s authority and credibility could more easily be called into question.

Various prior and small-scale excavations by Pius’s predecessors had totally failed to find Peter. Although they had been conducted in secret, the excavations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had eventually become known to the public, giving critics fodder to cast some doubt on papal legitimacy. Faced with growing skepticism in the twentieth-century world, no doubt exacerbated by the chaos of worldwide war, Pius chose to take one of the great gambles in human history — excavating under the Vatican itself to prove or disprove Peter’s arrival and death in Rome. Although he would seek to keep the excavations secret, he must surely have known that the results would leak out, as with the earlier efforts.

Pius’s decision was a strange and wild bet for a man known to be conservative and risk-averse in most every other way. Why? Almost certainly it was no gamble at all to Pius. He had an almost irrational, unwavering faith that Peter was there and would be found.

Chapter Seven: Pope Pius XII and His Team

Early Career

In 1924, while still in Munich, he witnessed the failure of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and predicted that Hitler “was finished” and “would never be heard from again.” In 1945, when the American diplomat Robert Murphy asked Pope Pius XII how his earlier prediction squared with “papal infallibility,” Pius replied, “I was only a monsignor then.”

Chapter Ten: Inside the Tomb

This wall, cut off by later construction, was covered in markings The marks were clearly Roman names and symbols, but they were otherwise unreadable to the Ferrua team, who dismissed the wall as unintelligible and insignificant.

In the rush to find the bronze sarcophagus, Ferrua largely ignored the other human remains the team periodically encountered. The field of forensic study of human remains for historical purposes was largely undeveloped at this time. It probably never occurred to the Ferrua team that the remains themselves could provide valuable evidence. The team ignored Kaas, the project leader, when he urged greater respect for the dead. [...] Kaas, however, would quiely return to the excavation site each day after work, where he would recover and respectfully box the remains that Ferrua and his team had passed over in their hurry. He did so more as a priest than an archeologist. He would then label and date the remains, citing the location where they were found, and give the bones to a workman to place in storage. Ultimately, Ferrua’s blindness to the Graffiti Wall and his indifference to human remains would delay for decades the discovery of the true story of Saint Peter.

Chapter Fourteen: Margherita Guarducci

It was not the dawn of archeology, but it was the morning of that science as a science. Discoverers like Battista Beldoni in Egypt and Heinrich Schliemann of Troy/Mycenae (modern-day Mykonos) fame had popularized the study, but they were as much adventurers as scientists. Their methods were often crude and unscientific, designed to discover wonderful artifacts as treasure hunters and bring them back to great museums like the Pergamon in Berlin and the British Museum in London. They were much less concerned with systematically studying and preserving sites. Kenneth Harl wrote cruelly, but accurately, of the great Schliemann that he had done to the Trojans what the Greeks could not do: destroy their entire city. In the 1920s, science began to replace the treasure hunt for artifacts. Archeologists started using a grid system, accurately surveying and carefully studying, strata by strata, to establish chronological order and gain all the information actually available from an ancient site. Epigraphy, photography, forensic evidence, and, much later, carbon dating and various tools of remote survey became implements of a much more scientific and thorough archeology. Guarducci was deeply committed to the use of these scientific methods and tools to arrive at the truth.

Guarducci in the Necropolis

The Necropolis had originally been sealed by the construction of the first St. Peter’s Basilica in 337, so it was apparent that all inscriptions must predate that. Her first great find was the faded inscription, “In Hoc Vince” — translated, “In this Conquer.” This inscription must have been carved less than eighteen years after Constantine’s victory. It confirmed to Guarducci the story that Constantine and his troops claimed to have seen these words written in the sky with a cross the day before their epic victory at the Milvian Bridge. This fantastic account had come to be widely regarded as a myth invented much later. Yet Guarducci’s discovery provided incontrovertible confirmation that this story had begun to circulate while the witnesses were still alive — it was not a later fabrication.

Chapter Seventeen: Ferrua’s Revenge

On June 26, 1968, Pope Paul VI announced to the world that Peter’s bones had been found, concluding that the bone fragments recovered by Guarducci from the Necropolis had been identified “in a way that we can consider convincing.”*

* [...] Lyman, “St. Peter’s Bones Fake?”, citing Lorenzo Bianchi, a leading archaeologist and expert on Church relics, “There are many ways to verify and I suppose there is no way to be 100 percent sure, but from circumstances and records, we can say some specific things about these bones: that they were buried there some time between 114 and 120 AD, that Constantine believed them to be authentic, that other records seem to support that. I think we can be as certain as we can reasonably expect to be about this.”

Chapter Twenty-One: The Great Persecution and Helena

The persecution by Diocletian is commonly called the Great Persecution because of the cruel and widespread slaughter of Christians. Prior to this period, it was an unthinkable crime for any Roman to disturb a grave — even the grave of a criminal, enemy, or Christian. By edict of Valerian and Diocletian, however, Christian graves lost their immunity. The emperors made war on the dead, desecrating Christian graves, ironically in the same way their own tombs would later be destroyed by the barbarians. Faced with this danger, it seems quite likely that brave unnamed Christians moved Peter to the Graffiti Wall niche during this period, leaving the hidden inscription, “Peter is here.” This is one plausible hypothesis for how the bones were moved.

In a nave on the main floor of the Vatican, there is a shrine to Helena with a wonderful statue of her. Ironically, her statue looks and gestures down, as if pointing for centuries to the unknown Necropolis below. We will likely never know the extent of Helena’s involvement in the movement of Peter’s bones. There is symmetry, however, in the idea of brave Helena, consumed with a passion for Christian archeology, preserving Saint Peter’s relics until their discovery 1,600 years later by another strong and brave woman archeologist.

text checked (see note) Jan 2024

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fromThe Fisherman’s Tomb byJohn O’Neillwith Sarah Wynne and Katie Clark

from
The Fisherman’s Tomb
by
John O’Neill
with Sarah Wynne and Katie Clark