Male or femur?

Jan Morris

The Bones of St Peter: The Fascinating Account of the Search for the Apostle's Body John Evangelist Walsh (Gollancz £7.50) Ato whether the bones of St Peter really are the bones of St Peter, to those of US of the less primitive religious persua- sions, animists for instance, it may not seem a matter of much importance. A bag of bones is a bag of bones, even in a reliquary. The reverence that attends such relics is a different thing, though, the holiness that centuries of obsession really has invested in them: and it is the fervour attending the search, rather than the nature of the quarry, which gives an intermittent excite- ment to Mr John Evangelist Walsh's ac- count of the Great St Peter's Bone-Hunt.

I am sorry to sound flippant, but in some ways it really is rather a ridiculous tale, and even Mr Walsh's earnest and diligent analysis cannot disguise its absurdities. The crux of the story is this: that though trach- hon had always assigned the grave of St Peter, who was supposedly crucified in Rome, to a spot beneath his eponymous Basilica, such monumental structures had been built upon the site that for many cen- times nobody saw it, and archaeologists were unable to excavate. The Catholic world was accordingly electrified when, in 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that not merely the grave, but actually the bones of the great apostle had been found and positively identified — in the very spot, directly beneath the Basilica's High Altar, Where the faithful had always believed them

to be.

Actually the bones had been found nearly 30 years earlier, when reconstruction work under the central aisle for the first time gave archaeologists the, chance to explore deep beneath the High Altar. In 1941 they had discovered, beneath successive layers of masonry, the remains of a Roman eemetery, and in the heart of the cemetery, Just as tradition had always insisted, a grave alinost incontestably St Peter's. Sure enough, it contained a collection of bones, Identified by the Pope's own physician as .undoubtedly those of a strongly-built elder- IY male, minus his head.

Minus his head was important, because the skull of St Peter had for at least 1,000 years been venerated in the Cathedral of St JdOhn Lateran, where it was somewhat in- Nistinctly preserved in a gilded reliquary.

.evertheless, the Pontiff of the day, Pope

plus XII, jumped to no conclusions, and I ocked the bones away in his private apart-

mhent. Further excavations continued, but e public was told nothing.

This was fortunate, for 14 years later the bones were again examined, by an eminent anthropologist, and declared to be not those of a strongly-built elderly male after all, but of three human beings, one of whom was almost certainly an elderly female. However it was belatedly remembered that one of the original in- vestigating team, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, had somewhat casually stored away in a box another collection of bones that he had found not actually in the grave, but in a small cavity hidden in a nearby wall, itself covered all over with an inexplicable jumble of graffiti.

Enter the formidable Dr Margherita Guarducci, one of Europe's leading epigraphists. She it was who realised those graffiti to be scratched in a kind of code, the inscriptions of a still persecuted cult in one of the holiest of their holy places. To her own satisfaction, if not invariably to everyone else's, she interpreted many of them as having some direct reference to the presence of St Peter, somewhere very near: and so her attention was drawn to those bones shut in a box by Monsignor Kaas so long before.

Here was a problem: this time they really did seem to be the bones of a strongly-built elderly male, but this time too they included not only the skeleton of a mouse, but parts of a human skull! What price now all those centuries of devotion to the ,reliquary at the Lateran? Relax. Called in once again, the eminent anthropologist compared the Lateran and the Vatican bones, and declared without further elaboration that they were, so to speak, compatible. Both could be venerated with equal assurance, and the mouse was an irrelevance.

So the matter was settled. Pope Paul made his announcement, the bones were returned, preserved in plastic, to their place beneath the High Altar, and that was that. I was hoping throughout Mr Walsh's book that in fact it had not been that, and that he was saving up for his last pages some stun- ning exposé. All through the work he had seemed to be leading his readers towards such a denouement, with gripping chapter headings like 'Stroke of Fate' or 'The An- cient Silence', and tantalising suggestions of sensations to come.

But no, the Search for the Bones is done, and Mr Walsh's book turns out to be not one of your archaeological thrillers but, rather, a decently popularised digest of the excavation reports, supplemented by inter- views and by able, if scarcely scintillating, passages of description and speculation. At the very end, though, there does emerge a moving coda to the narrative: and as any animist might have foreseen, it concerns not the fact of the wretched bones, but the idea of them.

Two tremendous churches have been built upon the site of St Peter's grave: the 4th-century basilica of Constantine, the prodigious cathedral of today. But Mr Walsh suggests that a still earlier church lies there below their foundations: in fact that the grave of St Peter itself became the core of a church, 'the first true cathedral', and that the sacraments and rituals of Christ- ianity have therefore been celebrated on that very spot almost since the time of Christ himself — nearly 2,000 years of un- wavering devotion upon Vatican Hill.

We can scoff, we pagans, at credulous cults of skulls and tibias: but there is no mocking such grand constancy of passion.