The Vatican is not a palace with a tomb inside: it is a tomb with a palace on top. Before it was a seat, it was a pit. In the summer of the year 64, after the fire of Rome, Nero sought culprits and found them in that Eastern sect that refused to worship the gods of all.
Tacitus, who did not like them, left the inventory: covered with animal skins and torn apart by dogs, nailed to crosses, lit like torches to illuminate the night in the imperial gardens.
Those gardens, and the adjacent circus, were on the Vatican hill.
The obelisk that today centers St. Peter’s Square then stood on the spine of that circus: it is the only material witness still standing of what was done there to men who refused to offer sacrifice.
One of them, a fisherman from Galilee, was buried on the slope, among poor tombs, with no other marker than what could fit in the memory of his own.
Around the year 200, the presbyter Gaius wrote that he could show “the trophies of the apostles”: one on the Via Ostiensis, another in the Vatican. When Constantine decided to build the basilica, he did not level the hill for convenience: he cut it, dismantled it, and filled it so that the altar would fall exactly above the vertical of that pit.
Everything else—the dome, the baldachin, the cathedra—is geometry subordinate to a hole in the earth.
In 1950 Pius XII announced on radio that the excavations had found the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles; in 1968 Paul VI declared the relics identified.
On the adjacent wall, an ancient pilgrim had scribbled two Greek words that Margherita Guarducci read to the world: Petros eni. Peter is inside.
It is worth remembering what was asked of those dead, because it was not much. The Roman Empire was of exemplary religious tolerance: it admitted all cults provided one was added. Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, explained his method to Trajan around the year 112: he placed before the suspect the image of the emperor and the statues of the gods; if he offered incense and wine, he was free. A gesture.
To the elderly Polycarp, in Smyrna, the proconsul almost pleaded with affection: what harm is there in saying “Caesar is Lord” and sacrificing; respect your age; swear and I release you.
The argument was exactly today’s: it is culture, it is courtesy, it means nothing. Polycarp replied that he had served his King for eighty-six years and burned. In 250, Decius industrialized the test: universal sacrifice and official certificate. The papyri of Egypt still preserve those libelli, apostasy with seal and signature. There were Christians who yielded, so many that St. Cyprian had to invent nomenclature: sacrificati those who sacrificed, libellatici those who bought the paper, thurificati those who cast the grain of incense. To men who had yielded with the sword at their necks, the Church imposed years of public penance, and there was an entire schism over whether that was enough. The lapsi. That was the seriousness with which the primitive Church treated a single grain of incense wrung out by terror.
Ten days have now passed since the gesture in Cusco. On August 13, an ecclesial meeting presented by Vatican media as preparation for the papal trip to Peru in November opened without any Catholic prayer: in its place, a payment to the earth. An officiant explained that August is the month of Mother Earth, “who loves us so much, who is so affectionate”; coca leaves were distributed, blown on three times, and placed in the offering bowls. The grammar of the gesture is identical to that which the Empire demanded and the martyrs refused: the oblation to a divinity that is not God.
The images show offering, after the auxiliary bishop of Cusco and secretary general of CELAM, an official of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, also pontifical commissioner, with visible recollection. A priest who seems ready to drag Prevost himself in his fall to the infernos. After his presentation, the images capture him turning the nameplate face down before leaving the frame. The chronicle of Vatican News mentioned neither the rite nor the official.
Polycarp was offered life in exchange for the gesture and chose the pyre; in Cusco no one was threatening anyone, and the gesture was offered for free.
And afterward, nothing. Not a line from the Sala Stampa, not a clarification from the dicastery whose only constitutional reason for existing is to guard the integrity of the faith, not a word from the person concerned.
In 2019, when the carvings of Pachamama presided over a Roman church and ended in the Tiber, there was at least a papal apology to those who had felt offended; its scope could be debated, but the reflex existed that this required explanation.
Seven years later, not even that. Under Decius, the persecuting State issued certificates of apostasy; today the house itself issues silence, which is the modern libellus: a blank paper certifying that nothing has happened.
There is a man who every morning walks over that necropolis. He was elected on the exact vertical of the fisherman’s pit, under a dome that exists only to mark it. The meeting in Cusco was held, according to the propaganda of its own media, to prepare his trip; the scandal occurred in his Peruvian house, before his bishops, with his official, and has been on his desk for ten days. He could speak with a single sentence. It would suffice to recall what his office has taught for twenty centuries about the first commandment. He is silent.
And silence, when one can speak, ought to speak, and is kept by calculation, has a name in every language, and it is not very honorable.
Whoever tolerates and remains silent before the oblation to the idol made in the name of the institution that exists because some men preferred to burn rather than make it, comes dangerously close to being qualified as unworthy of the ground he treads. Because that ground is not marble: that ground is they. To rise above foreign ashes to tolerate what cost them their lives is difficult to qualify without incurring scandal.
Below, in the bare earth of the hill, remain the bones of those who did not offer. Petros eni: Peter is inside. Above, for now, there is only silence and fine robes.