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Article Excerpt
Down in the Vatican cellar, Catholics are 'venerating' the bones of chickens, pigs, and a mouse--in the belief that they are the bones of St. Peter. How this fraudulent situation came to be is a tangled tale going back to problems encountered by Pope Pius XII when he tried to find a place to stash his predecessor.
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Like previous popes, Joseph Ratzinger wants the secular world to believe that the mythical water-walker's mortal remains are part of the religious capital he now commands. To puncture the new pope's pretensions, we are reprinting this expose which originally appeared in American Atheist in the spring of 1997.
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Pope Pius XII said in his Christmas radio message on Dec. 23, 1950: "The essential question is as follows--has the tomb of St. Peter really been found? The final conclusion of the work and studies answers that question with a most clear yes. The tomb of the Prince of the Apostles has been found. A second question, subordinate to the first, concerns the relics of the saint: have they been found?" ... New investigations, most patient and accurate, were subsequently carried out with the results that we, comforted by the judgment of qualified, prudent, and competent people, believe are positive. The relics of Saint Peter have been identified in a way we believe convincing ... [W]e believe it our duty, in the present state of archaeological and scientific conclusions, to give you and the church this happy announcement, bound as we are to honor sacred relics, backed by a reliable proof of their authenticity ... [I]n the present case, we must be all the more eager and exultant when we are right in believing that the few but sacred mortal remains have been traced of the Prince of the Apostles, of Simon son of Jonah, of the fisherman named Peter by Christ, of he [sic] who was chosen by the Lord to found His church and to whom He entrusted the keys of His kingdom ... until His final glorious return. Pope Paul VI, June 26, 1968 (1)
Down in the basement of the Vatican, less than twenty feet beneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica, there is an ugly, graffiti-covered brick-and-plaster wall. Inside the wall there is a rectangular cavity containing nineteen clear Plexiglas boxes filled with old bones, some of which are claimed to be the mortal remains of St. Peter himself. A small breach in the wall allows two of the boxes and their bony contents to be seen through the open bronze work of a gate set some distance in front of the wall. Ten of the bones thus carefully preserved at this most holy focal point in all of Christendom, however, are the remains of domestic animals--goats, sheep, cows, swine, and a chicken. (2) Scripture tells us [Mk 14:30, 72] that Peter denied his master thrice before the cock could crow twice. Could this chicken be the remains of Peter's fabled cock?
The presence of pigs at the most sacred focus of a church such as St. Peter's is startling, to say the least. When we reflect that Simon Peter was supposed to have been Jewish before converting to Catholicism, the mixing of his alleged remains with those of swine cries out for an explanation. None of the popes, however, has ever even mentioned that pigs were being venerated in his cellar--let alone offered an explanation for this astounding fact. (a)(3)
One box contains the skeleton of a mouse. Perhaps it is being kept as the universal standard church mouse. The rest of the boxes, stowed away to await the Second Coming, contain what arguably may be considered to be the fragmentary remains of a man who was over the age of sixty at the time of his death.
The bones have been certified to be the veritable remains of the Prince of Apostles himself, St. Peter. That these are the actual remains of St. Peter we cannot doubt: a successor of St. Peter, Pope Paul VI, has confirmed the fact--although he never made it clear how the mouse bones and barnyard cattle parts functioned in Peter when he was alive. (b)(4) Most precious among the relics remaining of Peter's skeleton in the Vatican are 29 fragments of one of his skulls. (St. Peter's other skull is preserved in a reliquary at the Cathedral of St. John Lateran.) (c)
The skeleton and skulls now venerated as the remains of St. Peter are not the only relics of the Prince of Apostles to have been discovered by the Roman Church, however. In 1949, (5) Vatican archaeologists discovered a different skeleton of the bony saint, several yards away from the wall in which the bones presently worshipped reside. The bones were reported to have been found in a "hypogeum"--apparently a rough cavity hollowed out at the base of a wall coated with red plaster (the so-called Muro Rosso or 'Red Wall' against which the graffiti-covered wall abuts (see Fig. 1). They were reported to have been found in "a sepulchral urn of plain terra cotta."
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The bones were kept for fourteen years by Pope Pius XII himself, in his private apartment. Although he later hedged somewhat concerning the authenticity of the bones, it is obvious that privately he felt they were genuine. After all, his personal physician Dr. Galeazzi-Lisi and several medical experts had studied the bones minutely chez Pape and had stated that the bones were those of a man, powerfully built, who had been perhaps sixty-five or seventy years old at death. (6) If that wasn't St. Peter, who else could it have been?
A rather surprising answer to this question was given by Venerando Correnti, (7) an anthropologist hired by the Vatican in 1956 to study the pope's prized bones--the ones found in what Pius had certified to be the genuine tomb of St. Peter. Correnti first suspected that something was amiss when he pulled a third fibula from the pile of bones the pontiff had been hoarding for so long. Normal humans, of course, have only two fibulas--one in each leg. Then he discovered five tibias to supplement the three fibulas. This meant that he was dealing with five to eight legs! Although Peter was noted for his aquatic exploits--both as a fisherman and a water-walker--he was never mistaken for an octopus. And so, Correnti quickly must have realized the pope had been guarding the remains of more than one person: two men and an old woman, he finally decided. The men were adjudged to have been in their fifties when they died, the woman in her seventies.
In addition to the human remains, Correnti's collaborator Luigi Cardini identified bones that once galumphed around as hogs, sheep, and goats--and some that scratched around as chickens. Perhaps a fourth of...
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