If you ask Real Nice and far enough in advance when planning to visit the Vatican, you can get into the “Scavi Tour” where you get past the Swiss Guards and are admitted to the underground necropolis beneath the Vatican. Here you can see the 1st century graveyeard beneath the original St Peter’s beneath the current St Peter’s, where Peter was allegedly buried. At the end of the tour, after much build up, you are told that if you peep through a hole in the wall you’ll see where Peter’s bones were found. And you see a rock wall in the middle distance with a niche in it. And you get some BS story about how the bones COULD PROBABLY be St Peter’s according to non-transparent internal forensics conducted by the Church. They are CONSISTENT with St Peter. And those alleged bones of St Peter are not on display despite that they’re happy to have the mummified corpse of a couple of former popes on public display up above.
Yeah whatever. So that is what St Peter’s has buried under the main altar in the basilica. Fortunately the tour is cheap and has enough other points of interest to be arguably “worth it”.
Gasp! BS you say, the Vatican surely would never be a party to any sort of chicanery?
I mean what next, peddling superstitious cures at Lourdes, selling off splinters from “the” cross, a pair of Jesus’s old pants on eBay?
Well duh! The real coin is in peddling magic, clearly.
On my only visit to Rome, I was content to view the Vatican from St Peter’s square, did the usual tourist traps, drank cheap supermarket wine on a bench, next to the Tiber, looking at the impressive edifice of a papal castle, that a plaque claimed had never been conquered when Rome was sacked. Nice day, April in Rome is not too warm…the taxis on the way to the airport took us past some ancient gateways in to the city, tucked surreptitiously into hedgerows.
My only regret is taking, or at least not leaving, my ex wife there.
Meanwhile, an elementary concept for those who didn’t pay attention in class: “secret” files aren’t “secret” BY DEFINITION, if their existence is announced to the public, especially by an outfit whose journalistic credentials are at the same level as the office gossip.
LOL it’s a bs article about a mythical item that they don’t have that they’re claiming exists anyway. Gotta love the imaginary bullshit that Christianity floats.
