It was in 1506 that Pope Julius II decided to destroy the original St Peter’s, which had lasted for over 1,000 years and which was ‘cluttered with nearly 100 tombs, altars, and chapels added over the centuries’.3 In its place, and centred around the tomb of St Peter, a succession of architects – Bramante, Sangallo, Michelangelo, and finally della Porta – shaped the current basilica, along with its famous Bernini colonnade and central square. This replacement was, as Lees-Milne captures in the quotation that opened this chapter, designed to project the glory of the Roman Catholic CounterReformation after the Council of Trent. This was the response to Luther, where ‘the grandiose architecture, sculpture, painting and music of the baroque were an expression of the reinforced claim to rule of an Ecclesia militans et triumphans4 proclaiming a re-Catholicisation of Europe that ‘would be carried through politically wherever possible and with military force wherever necessary’.5
This was, therefore, a move that would plunge the Roman Catholic Church into precisely what its name suggested, a Roman Catholicism. Here, the series of challenges that the Church would face in Europe – from the French Revolution, from rationalism in science and philosophy, from the rise of the nation, from industry, would shape much of its theological pronouncements and papal edicts. My intention is not to summarise the history of the Church in this period,6 but merely to suggest that St Peter’s functioned as the epicentre of the ‘Church’ understood broadly, where – as critics have argued
– the city of Rome and the Pope, with its sacred relics and tombs, replaced the Eucharist and the body of Christ.7
As such, this provided a powerfully territorialised vision of the Church, where even after the defeat of the papal armies in 1870, it was unable or unwilling to relinquish this papal primacy. The growing sense of discontent voiced by many Catholics worldwide, particularly in the post-war period, culminated in the Second Vatican Council (1962-5). This overturned the hierarchical conception of the Church ‘as a kind of supernatural Roman empire’ with the Pope at the pinnacle, then the clergy, and then the faithful, replacing it with an understanding of the Church as the ‘People of God’, ‘a fellowship of faith which is constantly on its way in the world, a sinful and provisional pilgrim folk, ready for ever new reform’.8
Under John Paul II, there has been a pronounced shift away from many of the tenets of Vatican II. While Wojtyla has embraced some of the positive statements made by the Council, such as ecumenism and a turn towards Judaism, his papacy has been associated with a clear return to theological orthodoxy and, above all, universal – as opposed to culturally relativised
– teaching. Yet this has occurred in a period where the ‘place in the world’ of the papacy and St Peter’s has been transformed by new trends in communications, in air travel, and in television. And in this context, St Peter’s as a space has been dramatically transformed, evidenced not least in what the Pope himself saw as the key to his theology, the Holy Year or Jubilee of 2000.