On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke Read Free Book Online Page B

blessing. One hundred and forty sculpted saints march around the top of Bernini’s graceful colonnade rimming the sixteenth-century piazza, and I am warmed to see Francis among them.
    If the scope of St. Peter’s is meant to humble mere mortals, it succeeds. Two-story-high marble sculptures of Jesus and his disciples look down on the piazza from the basilica’s imposing façade, while huge marble replicas of St. Peter and St. Paul flank the broad marble steps leading up to the basilica. The separation is appropriate given that the two saints had a falling-out in the earliest years of Christianity and rarely spoke to each other again.
    For centuries St. Peter’s was the largest church in Christendom, until it was eclipsed in 1990 by Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, the capital of the Ivory Coast. But no matter. It is to St. Peter’s in Rome that Catholic pilgrims, including Francis, have always journeyed from all over the world.
    Francis was furious when he entered the basilica in 1205. Here he was in the very heart of the Catholic Church, yet the offerings left at the altar by other pilgrims were paltry in comparison with the stature of the saint they were supposedly honoring. Save Christ himself, and possibly the Virgin Mary, no other Christian was as venerated as Peter. Christ himself had changed the disciple’s name from Simon the Fisherman to Peter the Rock, and the Church considered Peter the first Pope, from whom all the subsequent Popes descended.
    Moreover, Peter, like Christ, had accepted, even sought out, his martyrdom. He and other Christians had been wrongly accused and subsequently persecuted by Emperor Nero for having caused the fire that engulfed Rome in A.D. 64. Legend has it that Peter had escaped Nero’s jail in Rome and was on his way out of town to safety when he met a man on the Via Appia and asked him the famous question
“Quo vadis?”
When the man replied that he had come to be crucified for a second time, Peter realized he was speaking to Christ and immediately turned around to go back to Rome—and his certain death.
    That such a man should be so poorly served at his own grave caused Francis to all but empty his purse at the altar. “Astounded when he came to the altar of the prince of the apostles that the offerings of those who came there were so meager, he threw down a handful of coins at that place, thus indicating that he whom God honored above the rest should be honored by all in a special way,” writes Celano.
    The sacred basilica Francis was visiting, the “old” St. Peter’s, was built by Constantine, the first Christian-convert emperor, at the beginning of the fourth century over the necropolis where the martyred Peter had been buried. The “new” and current St. Peter’s would be built on the same site thirteen centuries later. Tradition holds that both the Papal altar in today’s St. Peter’s, framed by Bernini’s hundred-foot-tall canopy of bronze (stolen and melted down from the Pantheon’s portico), and the more modest altar in the “old” St. Peter’s were sited directly over Peter’s grave. It is intriguing to think some of the coins from Francis’s purse may be among the assortment found during a subterranean search for Peter’s remains; early pilgrims to the old St. Peter’s evidently dropped coins directly into the grave through a grille in the marble slab covering it.
    Having made his dramatic offering to St. Peter, Francis left the basilica as he had entered it—through an enclosed garden known as Paradise. But the atrium hardly fit the definition of Paradise, filled as it was with beggars and the poorest of the poor pleading for a coin or two. Francis surely gave the poor what coins he had left, but the gesture was suddenly not enough for him.
    Instead he stopped among the beggars and committed one of the famous acts of his ongoing conversion—he swapped his fancy clothes with a beggar for his rags and found they suited him. “He put off his fine