Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Not at once did the tyrant’s servants succeed in laying hands on St. Peter. The Christians, ready enough themselves to face martyrdom and rejoin the victors who had gone before, could not reconcile themselves to the loss of the beloved Shepherd of their souls, and urged him, with wild entreaties, to flee to safety. He was still needed, they said; it could not be God’s will that the Church should be left desolate of his sustaining presence in such evil times. Sorely against his will he consented to leave the city, but, as he chose the Appian Way for his flight, it is clear that he only contemplated remaining hidden for a time in the subterranean retreats of the Pagus Triopius; had he meant to reach the coast, he would have taken the road to Ostia, emerging from the opposite and lower end of the town. In the very first years of his Pontificate in Rome, an edict of Claudius had banished the “Jews” from the city and it is believed that St. Peter accompanied them in their exile to this spot, and he would naturally turn to it in an emergency.

But, a little beyond the first milestone, the Apostle’s steps were arrested by a vision which must have filled him with joy and yet wrung his heart with memories of pain.[4] One came towards him through the dusk, bearing a cross. The never-to-be-forgotten eyes once more looked into his. We can almost hear now the wild cry of the Apostle—“Lord, whither goest Thou?”

“To Rome to be crucified anew,” was the answer.

The vision faded away, and, with a heart breaking with joy and love, the Apostle retraced his steps and told the faithful of the Lord’s will, now so clearly revealed. “The Prince of Pastors” had spoken. The hour for which His great vicar had waited so long was at hand—the martyrdom for which he thirsted, already prepared. The weeping brethren went out to see the place where Christ had met their Spiritual Father, and found there the impress of the Saviour’s blessed foot upon the stone. Later a church[5] was erected at the spot, but at that time all that was possible was to cover the sacred footprint and mark the site for veneration. (This stone was afterwards removed to the Church of St. Sebastian, but a copy of it is still kept at Domine Quo Vadis.) Every trace of the history of the Faith was so inexpressibly dear to those loving hearts! One disciple, who must have followed St. Peter at a distance on that memorable night, found in the path a little bandage which had detached itself from his foot (were his feet sore and cut from the many weary steps that the saving of souls had cost him?) and this was reverently treasured, and a Basilica called “In Titulus Fasciolæ,” and now known as the Church of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, was erected in after years to mark the spot and guard the humble souvenir.

All this happened apparently in the month of September or October. Within a year, at most, the mourning Christians, led by Clement, Peter’s successor, put up the marble tablet—found in 1911—a small tablet of greenish marble, on which these words were inscribed:

“Here the Blessed Peter absolved us, the elect, from the sins confessed.”

But what a chapter of history had been written between! St. Peter returned to the city and disposed all things for his death. His first care was to write his second Epistle General, his last will and testament, and his farewell to the faithful. “In a little while,” he says, speaking of his mortal body, “this my tent will be folded away, as was signified to me by the Lord Himself,” thus evidently referring to the vision on the Appian Way. Only the words of our Divine Lord surpass in majesty and tenderness that last Epistle of St. Peter. Heaven was very near as he wrote it, the celestial melodies were already in his ears, the recent apparition of his Master had filled his heart with love and longing almost too great to be borne, but that love translates itself into the most tender parental care for the children he was leaving behind. With what tears and devotion must the letter have been received in the different Churches that had known his care, when it came to them accompanied by the news of his death!

More important even than his farewell to his children was the matter of appointing his successor, the second of the long line of which our own beloved Pius X is the present representative. Although Linus had been for ten years St. Peter’s fervent auxiliary Bishop, his right hand in the government of the Church, whose vast growth had made it necessary in turn to appoint Cletus as auxiliary to Linus, the Apostle passed over them and chose Clement to immediately succeed him as the Vicar of Christ.[6] Clement with his noble name, his great gifts, and his eminent holiness, was the man needed in Rome at that moment, and, as Tertullian and St. Epiphanius attest, was at this time consecrated by St. Peter and then solemnly installed by him as head of the Universal Church.

Then came the beginning of the end, but the first stage was a long and weary one. St. Paul, it appears, besides his reported share in the downfall of Simon Magus, had drawn upon himself the furious wrath of Nero by converting two of his favourites in the palace itself, one a concubine, the other a chamberlain in close attendance on his person. His doom was pronounced at the same time as that of St. Peter, though the manner of their end was not at once decided upon. St. Paul was removed from the house in the Via Lata (now the Church of Santa Maria in Via Lata) and, with St. Peter, was thrown into the Mamertine Prison, and kept there for eight months. The very name of this dungeon still brings back to me a chill of fear when I hear it pronounced, for to me it was the most terrible spot in all Rome. Deep under the eminence which is crowned by the Capitol is a chamber cut in the rock, unlighted, unaired, and lined with the huge uncemented blocks which date from Rome’s prehistoric times; a prison dreadful enough by itself, but there is worse below. A square aperture in the floor, just large enough for a man’s body to pass through, gives access to another dungeon excavated beneath it, a pit of blackness, where Jugurtha and many other poor wretches, condemned to die by violence or starvation, moaned their lives away, before it was honoured by the presence of the Apostles. They were let down into it by a rope, and the men who were lowering St. Peter carried out their task with such brutal roughness that they knocked his dear head violently against the wall, in his descent. The wall must have been less hard than their hearts, for it took the impression, and the mark has been kissed for close on two thousand years by the lips of ardent pilgrims. I remember touching it, when, as a child, I saw it first, and receiving the most extraordinary thrill of a living reality of some kind. There is now a staircase by which to descend to the lower prison, but in my early days there was only a rough ladder leading into what, in spite of the guardian’s taper, showed as a black abyss. The place is thirty feet long and twenty-two wide, with a height of sixteen feet, and was often crowded with captives. We do not know how many it contained when the Apostles (probably not on the same day) were brought there; stagnant water covered the floor, and fetid odours made the air a poison, but where St. Peter’s feet first touched the pavement a spring of clear water bubbled up, and was running gaily when I visited the spot. We know that St. Peter and St. Paul converted and baptised forty-seven persons in this den, besides the two captains of their guards, St. Processus and St. Marcellianus, so that the little spring served for the most noble ends.

The damp cold of the dungeon is so deathly that the Apostles’ lives must have been preserved as by a miracle through those terrible eight months. They had bidden farewell to the light in the golden days of autumn; they came forth to meet its blinding radiance in the dazzle of June. Quickly the news spread among the Christians, ever eager to hear how it fared with their revered Pastors; and already, when these had but just emerged from their dungeon, loaded with chains and under a heavy guard, the intrepid crowd had formed in procession to accompany them to their triumph. Their sentences were already pronounced. St. Peter, the poor Jew, was to be scourged and crucified; St. Paul’s Roman citizenship forbade these humiliations; he was to be beheaded.