The Papal Basilicas (I): Four Spectacular Churches, One City

As many of you will know, the Pope is the Pope by virtue of being the bishop of Rome. Tradition held that the apostle Peter was the first bishop of Rome, thus establishing a direct line of authority from Christ to the current holder of the office. Over the centuries, as the papacy became as much a political player as a religious one, Rome and the papacy retained their importance. And the papal basilicas of Rome play no small role in that importance.

One of the many powers that a Pope has is to designate a particular church a basilica. This title brings certain privileges and allows the performance of particular ceremonies. Some basilicas sit on a martyr’s burial place (actual or alleged), which can give them an additional importance. The basilica itself started as an architectural type in early Rome. There they served as civil, not religious, buildings, and were also important gathering places for the people. Their form was rectangular with a central nave and one or more parallel aisles on either side. When Christians started building basilicas as places of worship, they retained the Roman form. Today, however, a Catholic basilica does not need to have such a form to be a basilica.

Indeed, there are over 1800 basilicas in the Catholic church, but only four of them are ‘major’ and all four (no surprise) are in the diocese of Rome. The most famous is St Peter’s, which we’ll cover in a subsequent post. Here we’ll tell you about the other three.

San Giovanni in Laterano

We’ll start with the granddaddy of them all. St John Lateran is the oldest and (historically) most important of the churches. This church, not St Peter’s, is the official seat of the Bishop of Rome and his official residence. And it is where the official papal throne (the ‘cathedra’) resides. Attached to the church is the papal palace, not open to the public. The church was established in 324 on the site of a Roman palace. But the building one sees today is largely a construction from the 17th century, fire and decay having destroyed the earlier church. The massive central nave has six niches on each side, with large-scale sculptures of the twelve apostles. The space itself is fantastic but we found the church a bit cold, monumental rather than moving. That said, we loved the fragment of fresco by Giotto, on one of the pillars near the entrance.

Santa Maria Maggiore

Though we’ve been in Rome only a few short weeks, we consider this church to be an old friend, since we pass it almost every day on our walks. (It’s about a ten-minutes’ walk from where we live and is on the way to many of the places we regularly go.) As its name indicates, it honours the Virgin Mary. Its construction goes back to shortly after the Council of Ephesus of 431. Which council officially affirmed that Mary was the ‘mother of God’, not just (as some held) the ‘mother of Christ’. (The dispute had to do with whether or not the divine and human natures of Christ were separable.) Like most of the great churches in Rome, it has required renovating over the years. The current facade is the work of the 18th century, the interior having changed several times over the centuries.

The interior space is immensely impressive. But the thing that really catches the eye are the beautiful mosaics in the nave and the apse. Some of these date to the 5th century. There are scenes of Moses parting the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptians, and also (naturally) of Christ and the coronation of Mary as queen of heaven.

The Church also contains a famous icon of Mary as the ‘salus populi Romani’, the health (or salvation) of the Roman people. This icon arrived in the 6th century, supposedly from Crete, and it was believed to have warded off plague from Rome. But the image that we currently see is probably the work of the 13th century.

San Paolo Fuori Le Mura

The Basilica of St Paul outside the Walls – the least well-known of the papal basilicas of Rome – took us by surprise. We approached it from one of the sides, and from a distance it seemed unimpressive. But what we were seeing was only one portion of the church. As we made our way down one of the long sides to get to the entrance, it dawned on us just how big it was.

So, it’s very big. It’s the second largest church in Rome (St Peter’s is the largest) and the third-largest in the world, with a length of 500 feet (150 metres) and a width of 250 feet (80 metres). The height of the interior is 240 feet (73 metres).

The basilica supposedly marks the site of where St Paul was buried after his martyrdom (67 CE), and his sarcophagus is beneath the altar. The emperor Constantine founded it in the early 4th century and the emperor Theodosius made it much grander. Like the other basilicas, it has a history of destruction (natural and human), the most serious in 1823. The currrent church dates largely from the 19th century. The 5th century mosaic in the apse, depicting Christ with some of the apostles, has partially survived somewhat, heavily restored. Still, it gives a good sense of what the original decoration might have looked like.

A distinctive feature of this church is that it contains portraits of all the popes from the first, St Peter, to the present day. These can be found decorating the nave and the side altars of the church. There are six spots left after Francis. Which is noteworthy, since legend says that when the spaces are used up, the world will end!

But Wait, There’s More!

There’s much more to be said about all of these papal basilicas of Rome, of course, but we’ll leave it here for now. What about the fourth? We (and thousands of our closest friends) will be heading for the Vatican and St Peter’s (the fourth of the papal basilicas of Rome) in a couple of weeks and will post about that, so stay tuned.