TU ES PETRUS

 

The Bones of Saint Peter Displayed by the Vatican for the First Time

To mark the end of the Year of Faith, the Vatican has for the first time publicly displayed the bones of St. Peter. While no pope has ever definitively declared the fragments to belong to the apostle Peter,  Pope Paul VI in 1968 said fragments found in the necropolis under St Peter’s Basilica were “identified in a way that we can consider convincing”.

The bones were discovered in 1939 in an excavation of the Vatican Necropolis below the main altar at Saint Peter’s Basilica, which has been the consistent traditional burial place of the first Pope since antiquity. The excavation, ordered by Pope Pius XII, found the bones in a first century funerary wall creche, with a Greek inscription of ”Petros eni”, or “Peter is here”.

The bones were found wrapped in purple and gold threaded cloth. Scientific study of the bones showed them to be of a “robust” man in his 60′s-70′s at the time of death.