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COPYRIGHT 1984 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
A golden band of mosaics rims the interior of Michelangelo's dome in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. It is emblazoned with that ultimate geological pun, Christ's words to Peter, taken ever since as the justification for papal supremacy and continuity. Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will buuild my church (Matthew 16:18)." In Latin, and in other languages of Christ's time, Peter's name means rock (petra)--so christ appointed his first pope by name and perhaps not without a touch of humor. (It's none of my business, of course, but i always regarde Peter--the mand who denied Christ three times, and then tried to slink out of Rome until Christ reappeared and responded with gentle admonition to his "Domine, quo vadis?" --as a fairly weak character to assume such a weighty responsibility.) in any case, the words in golden mosaics symbolize one of the great continuities in our fickle and ephemeral history--an institution (the papacy) that can trace its lineage for two millennia.
There is no city quite like Rome, and no institution quite like the Catholic church, for appreciating continuity--that elusive property that a paleontologist like myself must deem of intrinsic and inestimable value. If flexibility and tuning to deep human needs and feelings represent the best formula for continuity, then the Church of Rome wins this outsider's plaudits. At the beautiful Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, begun in the third century, boys play soccer in the adjoining square at dusk. As the day fades, they move into the lighted portico, under wonderful mosaics of the Virgin, and continue their game admidst the tombs of early Christians. The sacred and the profane must mix.
In the Casina Pio Quatro (Pius IV's palace) on the grounds of the Vatican, I met in January 1984, the beginning of Orwell's year, with twenty scientists from eight nations to draft a statement on "nuclear winter" that the pope might use in his speeches against nuclear war. Pius IV was a sixteenth-century pope of the powerful Medici family. His house is a Roman pleasure palace, with grottoes and terraces emblazoned with statues and bas-reliefs of
Roman youths in various postures of play and merriment. The ceilings are painted with swirling designs of imaginative creatures and rather frank symbols of sex and fertility. Cherubs hold aloft the six-balled Medici shield, the symbol of temporal power, with its title befitting a worldly king: Pius III Pontifex Optimus Maximus. Here and there, almost as an after-thought, a biblical scene--Christ's baptism by John, for example--fills a space amidst the Roman motifs. Again, sacred and profane, spiritual and...
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