Sound and Light, Sound and Fury

Sound and Light Show at the Vatican
in support of Enviornmentalism

Son et lumière shows with stories and their images being projected on historic buildings have been increasingly popular in Europe over the last forty years.  The Palace of Versailles, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Hôtel de Ville in Brussels, the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, the Parthenon in Athens, the Great Pyramid in Giza have all served as the screen for the sound and light displays.  Last week, on December 8^th—the feast of the Immaculate Conception—Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican joined the list as Fiat Lux, Illuminating our Common Home, an hour-long sound and light display highlighting the challenges of Climate Change was projected on Carlo Maderno’s 17^th century façade.  Images of seals, clownfish, dolphins, lions, monkeys, coral reefs, exotic birds and countless people from around the world were projected on the Basilica. 

It is no secret that Pope Francis is one of the world’s leading voices calling for environmental reforms to protect our planet from the effects of human-generated threats to the atmosphere, seas, rivers and land.  The Pope wrote his first encyclical, Laudato Si, outlining a Christian response to environmental threats.  The Encyclical set off a vehement reaction from the Katholik Krazies and last week’s son et lumière raised the pitch of hysteria.   It is becoming clear that Pope Francis is proving an irritant to a significant party within the Church that becoming more and more rebellious to his authority.  Even such once reputable sites as Rorate Caeli and Father Z’s What Does the Prayer Really Say?  are advocating open rebellion against the current Vicar of Christ. 

This is not a problem of Francis’ making but rather due to the poor catechesis given Catholics in the years before the Council when so many of our schools and catechisms were given to a monophystism  that rejected the true humanity of Christ, giving us instead a Deity who ruled over creation but never truly entered into it.  This was reflected in our liturgy which, at the time, was totally separated from the realities of everyday life.  I was pondering this point this morning as I watched people gather for Mass and quietly greet one another as they took their places in Church.  We had always been taught that our attention should be directed solely towards the Christ present in the tabernacle.  There was no appreciation of Christ present in his mystical Body, the Church.  Everything was over-spiritualized and other-worldly.  This world did not matter at all.  The implications of the Incarnation on our daily lives were totally overlooked.

Those who oppose Pope Francis on issues of climate change do so not for theological reasons but for political-economic ones.  They uncritically buy into the economic systems that are irresponsibly exploiting our natural resources and destroying the environment in favor of short-term gain over long-term human good.  But they justify this by their gnostic separation of the material and spiritual worlds.  The Incarnation teaches us that this created world has been sanctified by God becoming part of it in Christ Jesus.  The orthodox Christian knows that we cannot divide the sacred from the profane—that creation is now shot-through with the God who is its origin and its destiny.  Perhaps Gerard Manley Hopkins put it best  

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
        

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
        

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.

Why do men then now not reck his rod?


Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
        

And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
        

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:

the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
        

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;


And though the last lights off the black West went
        

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — 


Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
        

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

oh, but I forgot, Hopkins was a Jesuit.  We can hardly look to him for orthodox Catholicism!

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXVII

The interior of Wittenberg Castle

Church where Luther was to become

preacher

Well, in our last post we talked about Martin Luther and how his vocation evolved from the study of law to becoming an Augustinian friar of strict observance and a professor of Scripture at the University of Wittenberg.  Luther finished his doctorate in 1512 and the same year began teaching at that university.  The university was new and the pride of its founder, the Elector Frederick III “The Wise” of Saxony, who was anxious that his university take its place among the leading educational institutions.  It was the young friar, Martin Luther, who was to put the University of Wittenberg on the map. 
Luther had access to Erasmus’ Greek New Testament, published in 1514 and was thus able to read the New Testament in its original language.  Reading especially Paul’s Letter to the Romans proved to be a conversion experience for the young friar.  Long troubled by scrupulosity and unable to satisfy his spiritual anguish by religious observances, Luther discovered in Paul that we are set right with God not by our religious practices but by our faith in Jesus Christ.  This was revolutionary for Luther.
By the sixteenth century the Catholic Church had drifted far from the New Testament, not so much in doctrine as in piety and devotion.  Keeping the scriptures in Latin made the Bible the prerogative of the clergy and left the vast majority of laity dependent on the clergy for spiritual guidance.  There were always a few laity who were educated enough to be able to read the Latin text of the Scriptures, and even fewer among them who actually did.  In England, for example, you had Saint Thomas More who as a layman took his faith seriously and whose devotion was very much in line with the best biblical and patristic scholarship of his day.  This was, after all, the beginning of the Renaissance and More is perhaps the best example of the new piety emerging by those desirous of a reformed Catholicism.  But most people were less educated—and less committed—than Thomas More and simply listened to sermons and accepted the Christian faith second hand from preachers—not all of whom were sufficiently disciplined to maintain biblical orthodoxy.
As I write this I know that I am sounding like an anti-Catholic “evangelical” (the sort of person I usually refer to as “pseudo-evangelical” by how they themselves distort the scriptures by taking texts out of context and making the “Good News” (the evangelion) bad news for most of us.  (Evangelion means “The Good News of a Victory” but for many who call themselves evangelicals it has come to mean the bad news of sin supposedly trumping grace in anyone who doesn’t follow their particular religious notions.  They are sort of today’s scribes and Pharisees who claim to know God’s mind because of their particular twist on the Scriptures.) The fact of the matter is that I am an ardent and convinced Catholic but as a historian I need to acknowledge that the Catholic Church, in its practice if not in its doctrines, had drifted far from the apostolic faith revealed in the Christian scriptures.
One of the reasons—and I believe the primary reason—for this drift away from the apostolic truth was a dramatic switch in theological method that took place in the 13^th century and afterwards.  Saint Bernard is often called “the last of the Fathers” because he was the last major Christian writer to use the old patristic method of drawing theological reflection from the scriptures.  Bernard’s nemesis was Peter Abelard. (Actually the way it worked out was that Bernard was Peter Abelard’s nemesis for Bernard brought Abelard down and all but destroyed him for his new ideas.)  Abelard, a professor at the Cathedral School of Paris, drew not on the patristic tradition of scriptural reflection but on a new method based more on Aristotelian logic.  Aristotle’s philosophical methodology had recently been introduced in Europe through contact with the Arab world and its philosophers who had long preserved this tradition that they had learned from the Syrian culture that in turn was strongly shaped by Greek influence.  In Abelard’s system logic trumped Tradition and the new theologians were anxious to redefine the ancient truths of the Christian faith using his new system.  Abelard was condemned for his innovations,  but the methodology persisted and became know as “scholasticism,”—the methodology of the “schoolmen.” (The Latin word for school is schola.)  This revival also coincided with the revived interest in law and philosophers and theologians began working like lawyers—taking an established premise and drawing from it new conclusions far deviant from the intent of the original author.  Thus they might start with a scripture quote or a quote from the Fathers but by the use of logical deduction draw from it entirely new and very untraditional meanings.
The Christian author whose work legitimized the new system was Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas, of course, was most orthodox in his conclusions even if he was quite revolutionary in his methodology.  The problem is not in the conclusions—at least in Aquinas’ conclusions—it is in the methodology.  Aquinas used the unorthodox system to establish the intellectual legitimacy of traditional doctrine.  Other writers were to take the faith and distort it way beyond the limits of authentic Tradition leading to all sorts of problems for the Church as bizarre practices  became legitimized by this faulty system that valued logic over Tradition. An example of this is that ideas about “sacrifice” were attached to the Mass that had no foundation in Scripture or the Fathers of the Church.  (There are legitimate concepts of sacrifice connected to the Eucharist found both in the language of the New Testament and the Fathers of the Church but the new theologians exaggerated them far beyond their Traditional meaning.)  There were also emerging among the scholastics bizarre notions about sin and about the forgiveness of sin and  the punishments due to sin.  There were exaggerations of the difference between clergy and laity and the “powers” of the priesthood.  All these and other distortions led to some very bad practices in Catholic life. 
One of the most egregious distortions concerned the notion of “indulgences.”  Indulgences were originally substitutes for public penance.  Perform certain acts or say certain prayers and days were taken off the penance given to a penitent in confession.  So, a donation to the Church or a pilgrimage to a local shrine might mean that a penitent had only to fast for a week instead of a month.   That was the original idea.  But as public penance disappeared in the central Middle Ages, let’s say the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and as the doctrine of purgatory gained more and more acceptance, indulgences became seen as so many “days” chopped of a soul’s sentence in purgatory.  Purgatory itself was a problematic doctrine without scriptural foundation and by the sixteenth century an elaborate understanding had evolved of how even when sins had been forgiven there was still a “temporal punishment” due for them.  In other words, most people would have to serve time in some sort of post-mortem jail until their sins had been sufficiently punished and then and then only could they go to heaven.  Indulgences shortened—or even wiped out—the punishment and won the poor soul an early parole.  This is just another example of how scholastic theology invented doctrines and created practices foreign to both the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. 
Luther looked on this whole theological house of cards that scholasticism had created and saw how far it was from the theology of Saint Paul, particularly in the Letters to the Romans and the Galatians.  He posted 95 theses he wanted argued at the university in order to re-focus the Church on its own authentic roots rather than the invented doctrines and practices of the scholastic era.  He would have caused not even a ripple in such debate except for one thing.  The pope needed money to build Saint Peter’s and a German preacher, the Dominican friar John Tetzel, was raking it in with  his distorted preaching on indulgences.      

Antonio Sangallo and the Construction of the Papal Grottoes

Tomb of Pius XI in the Vatican Grottoes
beneath Saint Peter's Basilica

I gave short shrift yesterday to Antonio Sangallo the younger in my eagerness to get to Michelangleo’s role in the design and construction of St. Peter’s Basilica.  I had mentioned how he had diverted materials and labor from the Basilica to build a palace for himself on the Via Giulia, Rome’s most fashionable street but his time as Capomaestro or chief architect was marked by nepotism and graft as he gave contracts to all his relatives and friends, hiring members of his clique for all the chief positions.  Yet he did make several important contributions to the project,  Despite a mutual loathing between Bramante and the Sangallo clan, he had been hired by Bramante as chief carpenter.  Bramante had recognized the young Sangallo’s genius and Antonio had not disappointed him, devising a unique system of scaffolding to brace Bramante’s massive piers until the concrete set.  When Leo X put Sangallo in charge after Raphael’s death, Sangallo constructed a scale model of the projected Basilica according to his design.  It was perfect in detail and even on a scale of 1:29 it was over twenty feet high in the dome and 23 feet long from front to back.  It cost over 6000 ducats—a parish church could have been built for less.  But it gave—for the first time—a detailed plan of what the finished Church might look like.  In the end, Michelangelo’s revisions and Maderno’s façade would (thankfully) give a very different look to the Basilica but at least now there was a plan even if it would be changed.  Just seeing a model of the Basilica made people think that it might become a reality out of the rubble pile that currently stood on the site. 

      Sangallo made an even more important contribution to the Basilica by raising the level of the floor 12 ½ feet above the level of Constantine’s basilica.  While this altered Bramante’s proportions, and not for the better, it also created the crypt beneath the nave that would become the grottoes of the papal tombs.  (In the 20^th century, the crypt floor would be lowered a meter to give more headroom.)  Despite his elaborate plans, however, actual construction on the basilica would progress little by the time of Sangallo’s death in 1546.  It was just as well as his successor, Michelangelo, wanted to clear the deck and start over.  Michelangelo would develop what his predecessors, especially Bramante, had built but at the same time he would take those elements and integrate them into a design uniquely his own.   

Back to the Saga of Saint Peter's Basilica

Michelangelo's dome from
the Vatican Gardens

You know it has been almost six months since the last posting on the history of Saint Peter’s Basilica.  It is taking as long to tell the story as it did to build the darn thing and like the building, the telling of the story is coming in fits and starts.  All through the sixteenth century it was stop and go as the popes were distracted by other things—like the sack of Rome, the Protestant Reformation,  the Council of
Trent.  And so too with this blog, my mind wanders to other topics, old and new, but now let’s come back to the basilica at least for a while.

      Look at the label’s list on the right hand side of the blog, and scroll down to “Saint Peter’s Basilica” and you can see in the entry for November 6 2011 that we left off the story with the death of Raphael, the hiring of Peruzzi to replace him, and the standstill to progress with Adrian VI and then with the sack of Rome.  So, let’s pick it up there—and here we come to the take-charge master of the works who left his indelible mark, Michelangelo.  

     Well, actually there was an interlude of about ten years or so between Peruzzi and Michelangelo when Antonio da Sangallo was the chief architect.  At this point all that had actually been built were the four piers on which Bramante had planned to construct the dome—the same four piers that stand today at the crossing of the Basilica.  Sangallo strengthened these piers so that a heavier dome—one supported by a large drum—could be built on them.  But most of what Sangallo did was to divert building materials and labor from the  Basilica to the palace he was constructing for himself on the Via Giulia.  That palace stands today as the Palazzo Sacchetti. 

Michelangelo was a superior genius but he never admitted that anyone else could have been in the same league.  He was not about to carry out the plan of some lesser genius—or one whom he perceived to be a lesser genius.  However, he was no fool and recognized that each of the previous plans had certain features that were brilliant.  He totally redesigned the master plan for the Basilica—which can be considered  his work more than that of any other—but he drew on the work of Bramante and Raphael.  He reverted to Bramante’s original idea of a Greek Cross—i.e. with the four arms of the cross of equal length—under a central dome.  And Michaelangelo designed the dome—one of the most elegant in the world—and for centuries the largest. The dome is truly a wonder as it seems to float over the empty space of the central crossing of the Basilica without support.   Unfortunately, due to alterations in the nave and façade by Michelangelo’s successor, Carlo Maderno, the dome is not clearly visible from Saint Peter’s Square but can only be seen from the distance. 

Hoy Week II

I have spent several Holy Weeks in Italy and while there are several places that offer an exceptional experience, Rome isn’t one of them.  (Trapani in Sicily which retains much of the influence of its centuries under Spanish Rule is about the best that I have experienced.)  Holy Week in Rome is a tremendous disappointment.  The papal ceremonies, if you are seated close to the altar are simply turgid with pomp and drag on with an infinity of lugubrious ceremonials.  If, on the other hand, your place is in the midst of the crowd, the papal ceremonies take on the touristy air of a celebrity visit to the county fair.  From either vantage point, it is all about the Pope, and Christ and his passion is somewhat coincidental—more the occasion for the spectacle than its focus.  The one exception, at least to some extent, is the Friday Evening Stations of the Cross at the Coliseum.  It is possible there to find some dark and mystic archway in which to lurk in contemplation of the rites and shut out all that is extraneous to the Story being relived. 

     If you don’t go to the papal ceremonies, most of the parishes are pretty pathetic for the Holy Week liturgies.  Romans tend to be shabby at best about the liturgy.  Roman organists have an ability to make the most majestic pipe organs, even the ones in Saint Peter’s, sound like a circus calliope.  This is the culture that has given us Grand Opera, but the current taste in Church music almost makes one yearn for the Ray Rep guitars of 1970 Chicago.  There is great music for this week in the Church’s repertoire, but in church Italians just seem to have a taste for the most base and vulgar tunes.  And then they wear these moth-eaten shabby vestments left over from the 18^th century and the clergy stumble around the sanctuary in their birettas scratching their backsides and yawning.  It isn’t inspiring.     

     I always found in Rome that if one couldn’t flee the city the best place to go for worship, even on an ordinary weekend, is the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere that is the home of the Community of Sant’Egidio, one of the most phenomenal products of the Second Vatican Council.   Over the years their liturgies have lost the primitive simplicity they had when they were in their own tiny sanctuary across the piazza behind the basilica, and have instead become a bit more “High Church” than I care for, but they are prayerful, intensely prayerful with soulful singing. 

     I was fortunate one year to find this Palm Sunday procession in the Borgo Pio, just outside the Vatican gates.  I didn’t join them for Mass but the procession was lovely and sincere, even if it displayed the Italian’s unique skill for organization. 

A lot classier than the Popemobile

Pius IX carried into Vatican I on the Sedia

Gestatoria -- 1870.  note the large fans, the

flabella, on either side of the Pope. 

Well my time in Rome has been interesting for a variety of reasons.  I don’t know the people that Rocco Palma does with Whispers in the Loggia.  I need to remember to read that blog more often as I do like it and he really knows the right people to get the scoop on things that circulating in the back alleys of the Eternal City, but I try to keep the focus on history and not current events so I need books more than “sources.”  I have lived in Rome off and on over the last twenty-some years and been a frequent visitor in the in between times so I have had chance to develop a lot of friendships with people who are insiders to the system.  Rome is the most incredible rumor mill that I have ever encountered and I do hear the most curious things.  The problem is that since the Holy See is a bureaucracy and “power” is distributed among so many different discasteries—and at different levels of those dicasteries—is that there are few reliable ways to check rumors for whether they are “an idea,” “a proposal,” “a recommendation,” or “a decision.”   There is a rumor floating around that Benedict is going to bring back the sedia gestatoria, the portable throne on which popes were carried for centuries on the shoulders of the palafreneiri.  I had seen the sedia gestatoria on my first visit to Rome back in 1978 when I saw Paul VI carried into the Basilica of Saint Paul fuori le mura for the Corpus Christi Mass.  That was just about its last cry.  Paul died two months later and his successor John Paul II did away with the portable throne and then, at the insistence of the papal masters of ceremonies, brought it back so that he could be seen above the crowds.  It was back only a week or two when he died and his successor John Paul II flatly refused to use it.  Voila la popemobile.  We had all thought the sedia gestatoria  finished, but Benedict loves rooting around the Vatican attic as we all know and so perhaps we shall see it again.  I am a bit skeptical but maybe we should watch for Christmas Midnight Mass! 
      My biggest concern is that I would think that it might be a bit dangerous.  Should anyone take a shot at the pope while he is high above the crowd it would be difficult to get him down quickly before a second or even a third shot could be fired.  Or an attack on the footmen carrying the sedia gestoria—bring down a couple of them and send the Pope toppling down to perhaps serious injury.    Popemobiles can be speeded up—not as fast as one would like, but fast enough—and on ground level, the pope can be easily surrounded by aides and bodyguards while he is gotten to safety or medical attention as needed.  The Sedia Gestatoria might be glamorous but I don’t think it is a good idea.  However, I don’t get a vote in these things so we will see.
      As I check out sedia gestatoria, there is debate on how long the portable throne has been used.  It has certainly been around for at least six hundred years and some sources say a thousand.  Indeed some say that it is simply an adaptation of the custom of carrying Roman consuls through the streets of Rome on their chairs of office hoisted onto the shoulders of captive peoples.  Indeed, it seems to have been a common practice in the later years of the Roman Empire when Christianity was the State Religion, that not only the Pope but many bishops were carried shoulder high to their being consecrated and/or installed in their cathedrals.  Ennodius Magnus, a sixth century bishop of Pavia, specifically mentions the custom of carrying the Pope in a chair elevated on the shoulders of bearers, presumably minor clerics of the pontifical household, but it is not clear whether this was a usual practice or specifically connected with his enthronement in the Lateran Basilica.  In the context of Ennodius’ claim, some sources such as the old Catholic Encyclopedia (1917) mention the “cathedra Petri”—and ancient chair said to be the “cathedra” (bishop’s chair) of Saint Peter kept enshrined in Bernini’s magnificent tribune above the Altar of the Chair in the apse of Saint Peter’s Basilica as proof.  The chair in question, a lovely construction of wood and ivory panels, has rings through which the bearing poles could be, and probably were inserted.  The problem is that the chair has, subsequent to the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia, been dated to a gift from the emperor Charles the Bald to Pope John VIII.  For some years the original chair was on display in the Treasury of Saint Peter’s though it is now returned to Bernini’s supersized reliquary and a copy of it put on display.  The chair does indeed have rings affixed to the side and so the custom of carrying the pope on a portable throne can be dated at least back to the ninth century but reasonably could be a continuation of even more ancient practice.    What I am trying to get information on are the flabella—the large ostrich plumed fans which were carried for centuries alongside the pope as he rode on the sedia gestatoria.  I remember that they were originally a gift from the Sultan of Egypt to a pope, but I cannot find dating for the gift.  I will keep searching. 

History Sometimes Flunks Theology Exams

The Theodora Episcopa Mosaic in the Basilica

of Santa Prassede in Rome

Sometimes I get correspondence about this blog asking why I bring up contemporary issues such as the new translation of the Mass which goes into effect at the end of this month or suggesting that I keep opinions to myself and “stick to the past.”   I think this is because most people who have not studied history in depth don’t understand what history is all about.  History is not about the past.  History uses the past as metaphor to speak about the present and the future.  In that way history is really a tool that helps us better understand not only our world and how it has evolved to be the way it is, but to help us understand human nature and how and why people act the way they do.  If one gets the doctorate in Church History one gets a degree such as D.Hist. or H.E.D. (Historia Ecclesiae Doctor) depending on the institution at which one studies but in the “real world” of academia, if academia can be called a real world—and I admit that is very debatable—the doctorate is Ph.D.  Philosophiae Doctor—Doctor of Philosophy.  We study history as philosophy, that is as a branch of the “love of wisdom” (which is what the word “philosophy” means.  It is not enough to know the facts, one has to be able to interpret the facts into a coherent narrative that gives us not only information but insight. 
     And a historian who studies the history of the Church is looking for insights, often insights that Theology—a discipline that is restricted by the authority of the Church—is prohibited from giving.  The historical facts often contradict the Theological doctrines, leaving theologians, at least Catholic Theologians,  powerless to set the record straight about things.  There are, for example, teachings once declared infallible that are no longer held by the Church.  At one point in the history of the Church, for example, the Church taught that only those “subject to the authority of the Roman Pontiff” could be saved.  The Church no longer holds that—and has not held it for a long time.   What are the implications of that for the notion of papal infallibility?    There are theological presuppositions unsupported by history—what does that do to magisterial authority?  For example: current Church teaching declares definitively that there never were women ordained to the ministries of bishop or priest.  Frankly, that question is—from a historical perspective—not closed.  (It is from a doctrinal one.)  Historians are still weighing and debating evidence to that question.  There are some archeological monuments that can be interpreted as referring to female bishops or priests.  The question is complex from historical and archeological perspectives.  Are we sure that they mean that the referred to females were bishops or priests?  No.  They could be the wife of the bishop (not uncommon before the fourth century) or the priest (not uncommon before the 12^th century).  There is a famous mosaic in the basilica of Santa Prassede in Rome that displays the image of “Theodora episcopa”—Theodora, the Lady Bishop.  This mosaic—from the early ninth century, is far too late for there to have been a lady bishop; moreover we know that Theodora was the mother of the Bishop, Pope Paschal I.  So you have to be careful how you interpret these things, but just because this particular artifact does not mean that the woman was a bishop one cannot say that several dozen other inscriptions from earlier centuries cannot refer to a woman bishop or priest.  And if they do so refer—was the bishop or priest in question a bishop or priest in the “Great Church” (i.e. the orthodox and apostolic Christian Church which antecedes both the Catholic and Orthodox Church) or from one of the many sects now seen to be schismatic or heretical such as the Collyridians or the Montanists who did ordain women.  Frankly the jury is out on the question of women’s ordination and the difficulty is that to prove that the Church never ordained women is an all but impossible task whereas a single example suffices to prove that they did.  Historans can look at these questions; Catholic theologians can’t—at least publically.  Moreover, the ministries of bishop and priest have evolved through the centuries.  Indeed, were there “bishops” and “priests” –in our theological understanding of a tripartite Sacrament of Orders—Bishops, Priests, Deacons—before the time of Ignatius of Antioch at the end of the first century?  It is a complex question.   There were episodes in the history of the Church—perhaps as late as the thirteenth century—when priests could confer the sacrament of Holy Orders.  On the other hand, there were times when it seems that priests were not seen as having the “power” to say mass or forgive sins.    The “powers” ascribed to the various orders (as in Holy Orders) have changed over the course of time.  Historians uncover the fact that things we think can never change have in fact been the product of historical evolution. The History of the Church unlocks possibilities for the future by showing us the variables of the past. 
     My closest friend of many years and his wife are Lutherans.  We often travel together and in the years I have lived in Rome they have been frequent guests.  They have never been able to get enough of Saint Peter’s—always wanting to return there. (I can think of a dozen churches I think are more beautiful and more interesting—including Santa Prassede that I mentioned above.)  And I always remind them that it was the building of this Church—Saint Peter’s—that triggered Luther and his protest against selling indulgences.  I love irony and history is full of irony.   History shows us that only God was in the beginning, is now, and shall be evermore.  We humans and our frail institutions—including the Church—come and go, changing to the needs of the times and like Ozymandias passing from the scene altogether when no longer needed. 

Saint Peter's Proceeds in Fits and Starts

Raphael's Plan for Saint Peter's

Well, Raphael was by all means a great artist, but he wasn’t half the architect Bramante was.  In the first place, he just wasn’t focused enough for architecture.  Saint Peter’s was only one of the many commissions he was working on.  He was busy frescoing the villas of various cardinals and princes and his workshop was turning out Madonna’s at an remarkable rate.  He was surrounded with an army of assistants to prepare canvases for paints and apply the plaster for frescos, to mix the pigments and produce the paints.  He was making money hand over fist and spending it even faster.  Raphael was a bon vivant and a ladies’ man.  And in between the business, the pleasure, the paintings, the frescoes, he was supposed to produce a plan for Saint Peter’s.  Good Luck!  Moreover, the help he had inherited from the triumvirate of architects when he took Bramante’s place vanished.   His Dominican friar teammate, Fra. Giovanni Giocondo died within the year and the old priest had been the engineer—and a very good one—to figure out the technical aspects of the design.  Giulano da Sangallo, the business manager was feeling his age and retired to Florence.  Pope Leo—who was more interested in jewelry and Hanno, his pet elephant—than architecture replaced the team to work with Raphael.  He named Baldassare Peruzzi to replace the old friar, and Giuliano da Sangallo’s nephew—Antonio the Younger Sangallo—to take his uncle’s place. It wasn’t a happy arrangement. 

Bramante's Plan for Saint Peter's

     Raphael for some reason decided to make a fundamental change in Bramante’s perfectly symmetrical plan.  Instead of the Greek Cross plan in which all four arms of the cross would be equal and lead to the central dome over the tomb of the Apostle and its altar, Raphael designed a Latin Cross plan where the “stem” of the Cross would be twice as long as the other “arms” of the cross.  In addition to destroying the symmetry of the building, it threatened to make the building look much more heavy as well as cut down the amount of natural light, or rather reduce the effect of the natural light, entering the basilica through the dome.  The Raphael plan just lacked the elegance of the original design.  It did make for a larger church, but it failed to inspire. 
      In the event, Raphael did not live long enough to see his designs bear fruit.  He died in 1520 at only thirty-seven years of age.  Peruzzi succeeded as main architect and reverted to the Bramante plan of a Greek Cross though he did retain some features—mostly the worst ones—of Rafael’s plan.  Peruzzi didn’t get to see his plans put into action either.  Thank heavens.   Leo died the year after Raphael and was succeded by the pedantic Dutchman (yes, I know that is redundant) Cardinal Adriaan Florenszoon Boeyens who reigned as Adrian VI.  Fortunately he reigned briefly.  One year, eight months, and five days later he was dead; the Roman crowds, delighted to be rid of the dour Dutchman, hung a laurel wreath on the door of the papal physician to thank the doctor for not having prolonged the boredom of this tediously scholarly pope who was far more interested in Reform (which the Romans have always abhorred) than art, beauty, and the Renaissance.  Non  fiducia mai un papa che ha letto solo (never trust a pope who sleeps alone) as the Romans are wont to say.   
      In November 1523 Adrian was succeeded by Leo’s cousin, Clement VII.  The Medici never slept alone, though Clements preference, unlike Leo’s, was for women.  Rampant heterosexuality in a pope brings problems of its own as we will see when we hear the story of why Henry VIII didn’t get his annulment, but that is another story.  Suffice it to say that Clement, like Leo, was a papal disaster.  Leo triggered Luther’s break with the Church; Clement would trigger Henry VIII’s.  Maybe the Romans are wrong about that sleeping alone thing, celibacy is a good idea at least for popes.  But on May 6^th 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome.  It was a debacle from which it would take Rome decades to recover.  We will go into detail in a future entry, but the half-demolished old basilica, half-built new basilica was looted, graves emptied, treasures stolen, clergy, soldiers, and laity alike massacred.  When Peruzzi died nine years later, construction on the basilica had not advanced. The walls stood incomplete where they stood at all, the four great piers waited for a dome that no one could engineer, and the revenues were drying up as country after country fell to a series of Reformations that snapped their ties with Rome.     

Popes Come and Go, but Saint Peter's Basilica Remains

the tomb of Leo X in Santa Maria Sopra

Minerva, Rome,

We mentioned that Julius II died in 1513,  Hopefully God judged Julius with mercy but the humanist scholar Erasmus who along with his English friends, Sir Thomas More and Dean (of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London) John Colet were leading voices calling for Church Reform  did not.  The Dutchman  wrote:
The popes are sufficiently generous with …the terrible bolt of the papal bull, which by a flicker hurls the souls of men to the depths of hell.  Our Christian fathers and Vicars of Christ wield the bold against no one with more zeal than against those who are moved by the devil to nibble at an diminish the patrimony of Peter  …  they look on themselves as true apostles…scattering what they are pleased to call her enemies   As if the Church had more deadly enemies than impious popes who by their silence cause Christ to be forgotten, who use His laws to make money, who adulterate his word with force interpretations, and who crucify him with their corrupt life 
Whatever the judgment rendered and where Julius finds himself today, his death meant that there was to be a new pope.  He was worse.  At least Julius, if not a good man was a good—even great—Pope.  His successor, Leo X, was a disaster both as a man and a pope.  As a man he was indolent and given to the most indulgent luxury.  He was a Medici, son of il Magnifico, and had been raised to see conspicuous consumption to be the highest of the virtues.  His sexual exploits were more discreet than most of his contemporaries but no less avid.  His preferences in bed were for other males—not an uncommon trait in the high renaissance—so he left no progeny but rumors abounded of young artists and even younger clerics anxious to advancement who feathered their nests by feathering his bed.  As a pope—well, it wasn’t that he did much bad just that he didn’t do much of anything.  “The papacy is ours, let us enjoy it” was his theme and so the Chair of Peter was mostly an opportunity for hunting, dining, theatricals, and entertainments of all sorts. He had absolutely no interest in Julius tomb and little more in the basilica.  At this point the basilica was a hodgepodge of new construction and old ruins, for the most part unroofed, with the papal altar left exposed to the elements beneath the open sky where the dome was planned to someday rise.   Julius for whatever his faults was a soldier and weathered the papal ceremonies in the open air, but Leo was of a more delicate constitution and so Bramante was told to build something of an open shed to enclose the papal altar—not unlike those carports one sees in the less well to do neighborhoods of Mississippi or East Texas. Bramante was getting old and the death of Julius meant that the changes of patronage were blowing through the Renaissance.   With Julius—and under Bramante’s influence—the Renaissance threw its patronage to artists from Urbino.  But Leo was a Medici and the Medici were Florentines.  And the Florentine artists, kept on the margins of influence under Julius—were now the chief beneficiaries of patronage.  Bramante was out of favor.  But Leo was a gracious man who showed his displeasure with a velvet gloved hand.  Bramante was not removed as chief architect of Saint Peters, only given two “assistants” to help him.  Like Bramante they were old men—Leo didn’t want to make long term commitments.  One was the Dominican friars Giovanni Giocondo.  He was no mere theologian—a philosopher, engineer, mathematician, Latinist, illustrator, antiquarian—he was a true renaissance man.  But he was eighty.  The other “assistant”—and one who was given managing control over the project—was Giuliano da Sangallo.  Sangallo had been both friend and architect to Julius until Bramante maneuvered his way into the Pope’s confidence.  (Again, he did it by building the Tempietto which may be the most beautiful building in Rome so it wasn’t an unmerited advancement.)  Now Sangallo was back—and holding the real power.  It was I imagine a sweet revenge.  It did not last long,however.  Bramante died within the year.  Strangely it was not a Florentine who replaced him but the young artist from Urbino who had so charmed Julius—Raphael