Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Number of quotes: 29
Book ID: 39 Page: 7
Section: 2E3
Named for the vati, or “soothsayers”, who argued there in classical times, the Vatican field lay on the west bank of the Tiber River,…[To 2E3]
Quote ID: 823
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 39 Page: 16
Section: 1A
As the Church became the dominant force in Europe, the simple message of faith grew more complicated, buried under the weight of excuses, exceptions, exemptions, clarifications, and amendments. An entire discipline, canon law, was formed to interpret them. The straight line to God to man became a circuitous road, obscure and obfuscated. The plot thickened, the main story line darkened.
Quote ID: 824
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 39 Page: 19
Section: 4A
The ideas of Aquinas and his Scholastics derived from the philosophy of Aristotle.
Quote ID: 825
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 19/20
Section: 2A4
He resolved the Great Schism that had been threatening the unity of the Church since 1377 (at one point, three popes, each backed by a rival political faction, claimed to be the legitimate heir to Peter and excommunicated the other two), and he proclaimed 1450 a Jubilee or Holy Year.Pastor John’s note: Pope Nicholas
In spite of the desolation, pilgrims descended on Rome from all over Europe. Many journeyed for months. They came over land and sea, on foot, on horseback, by oxcart and river barge. They braved the Channel crossing, trudged over the Alps, and sailed down the Tiber to visit the seven basilicas of Rome and to earn a pardon from their sins.
Quote ID: 826
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 21
Section: 2E3
* As he lay dying, Nicholas V explained his building philosophy to his cardinals: “A popular faith, sustained only on doctrines, will never be anything but feeble and vacillating. But if the authority of the Holy See were visibly displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials, and witnesses seemingly planted by the Hand of God Himself, belief would grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another, and all the world would accept and revere it. Noble edifices, combining taste and beauty with imposing proportions, would immediately conduce to the exaltation of the Chair of St. Peter….”
Quote ID: 827
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 27
Section: 3A2A
On November 1, All Saints’ Day, Giuliano della Rovere [PJ: 1443–1513] was elected Julius II, supreme pontiff of the Church of Rome, in a single ballot. It had taken almost twenty years and involved bribery, war, assassination plots, and at least the suspicion of poisoning—all very much business as usual in the Renaissance Church.
Quote ID: 828
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 27
Section: 1A
When Constantine picked up the shovel in the Vatican field to build his shrine to Peter, he blurred the distinction between Caesar and God. In architecture, in art, even in liturgical ceremonies and spiritual symbols, pagan and Christian became jumbled. Classical myths and Christian themes became chapters in the same unending story. On the bronze doors of Constantine’s basilica, Filarete’s nymphs played while Christian saints prayed.The secular and the sacred borrowed so freely from each other that by the time the Renaissance reached Rome, the two were as inseparable as body and soul. Christ’s dictum “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” was moot. Caesar and God—or his human proxy, the Vicar of Christ—were now one and the same.
The Renaissance papacy became a government more than a religion, led by statesmen and sometimes warriors who could rarely afford to be saints. More princes than pastors, they played one covetous state against another to maintain a balance of power.
Quote ID: 829
Time Periods: 46
Book ID: 39 Page: 37
Section: 2E1
The cross became the symbol of the empire’s new, official faith.
Quote ID: 830
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 39 Page: 53
Section: 4B
The Roman architects were extraordinary engineers. But somewhere on the long, rutted road from antiquity to the Renaissance, the techniques they devised to erect massive arches and vault vast spaces were forgotten. Even the material that made their feats of engineering possible was lost.
Quote ID: 831
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 39 Page: 63
Section: 4B
Renaissance artists were traveling salesmen, brushes and chisels for hire, traveling from city-state to city-state, competing for commissions.Pastor John’s note: patron
Quote ID: 832
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 67
Section: 3A4C
In August 1507, il pontefice terrible strapped on his armor and led an army north into Papal States of Umbria and Romagna, lost when the popes were in Avignon. Local princes and condottieri had taken advantage of the power vacuum to usurp control, and Julius was determined to retake the pivotal territory.
Quote ID: 833
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 71
Section: 3A2A
Although the alum mines had always been profitable, Chigi enriched the Church and himself by turning them into a monopoly. In this, he was aided and abetted by the incorrigible pope. Julius forbade any Christian from buying infidel alum on pain of excommunication.
Quote ID: 835
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 82
Section: 2C
The Apostolic Chamber was the finance department of the Curia. A classical Roman term referring to the Senate, the Curia of the early 1500s was small and informal—much different than it is today.
Quote ID: 836
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 95
Section: 1A
Raphael’s easy genius flowed within the parameters of the Renaissance. He was the quintessential artist of an age that wanted to return to a classical world, not invent modern times.
Quote ID: 837
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 39 Page: (0)
Section: 2E7
If they were great enough to invent such legends, we at least should be great enough to believe them. ---Goethe
Quote ID: 820
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 39 Page: 105
Section: 1A
Pope Julius Secondo, the Christian Caesar and pontefice terrible—died on February 21, 1513, after asking his closest aides to pray for his immortal soul. What regrets did he have at death? What sins did he confess? Bribery? Misuse of power? Warmongering?According to Paris de Grassis, the pope’s conscience was heavy in his last hours, “for he had sinned greatly and had not bestirred himself for the good of the Church as he should have done.”
Quote ID: 838
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 39 Page: 115
Section: 1A
The cardinals who administered the religious and political affairs of the Church were not always ordained. The office did not require them to be. They were diplomats and administrators—the Roman Senate of the Roman Church.
Quote ID: 839
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 39 Page: 133
Section: 2E3
Raphael’s plan had an aisled nave, an impressive, double-storied facade, and a piazza with the obelisk of Caligula in the center—very much as it is today.
Quote ID: 840
Time Periods: 17
Book ID: 39 Page: 144
Section: 2C
He squandered fortunes with benevolence and emptied the Vatican treasury in two years. When the coffers were bare, he came up with ever more creative and corrosive ways to pay for his largesse. Leo sold more cardinal’s hats. He also increased the number of venal offices by almost one thousand, bringing some six hundred thousand additional ducats to his treasury and prompting one critic to complain, “Everything is for sale—temples, priests, altars…prayers, heaven and God”.When Leo had exhausted the wealth of the Church, he hawked indulgences like tickets to paradise.
Quote ID: 841
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 145
Section: 2A4
An indulgence doesn’t buy forgiveness. It only lessens the penance imposed.
Quote ID: 842
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 145/146
Section: 2A4
Granting an indulgence is comparable to commuting a sentence. From the Latin indulgeo—“to be kind or tender”—it derives from Roman law and from the Old Testament book of Isaiah (61:1). The prophet says, “The Lord hath anointed me…to heal the contrite of heart.”
Quote ID: 843
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 152
Section: 3A2A
Pesky priests had gotten under the skin of princes before. When Henry II of England asked, “Will no one rid me of this priest?” Thomas á Becket was murdered the next night in Canterbury Cathedral. More recently, Alexander VI had answered the Florentine friar Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities with his own bonfire and tossed the friar on the pyre. Luckily for Luther, when he began decrying Rome, a gentler Medici was pontiff.
Quote ID: 844
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 154
Section: 1A
Intent on immediate gratification and with little apparent concern for the future, Leo X presided over what would be both the apogee and the final act of the Renaissance. The history of Rome was repeating itself. Renaissance Rome had not only rediscovered classical culture, it embraced the licentiousness that precipitated the fall of the imperial city.
Quote ID: 845
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 39 Page: 162/163
Section: 3A4C
Under the imperial banner of Charles V, German and Austrian troops marched south and joined the Colonna forces. Wiping out the papal army, they ravaged the city.….
Rome may hold the record for the “most sacked city in history.”
….
All things being relative, though, the barbarian hordes were compassionate invaders compared with the troops of the Roman Catholic emperor Charles V, a pious Christian, champion of the faith, and an avowed foe of Luther.
When his imperial army swarmed over Rome in 1527, everything sacred was profaned.
….
Soldiers broke into the reliquaries in the Basilica of St. John Lateran and played ball with the heads of Peter and Paul. A priest who refused orders to give Communion to a donkey was butchered. Roman countesses and baronesses were raped, forced into brothels, and labeled “the relics of the Sack of Rome.” Men were tortured for money and ransom. Guicciardini’s brother Luigi described the brutality:
Many were suspended for hours by the arms; many were cruelly bound by the genitals.
….
Others again were forced to eat their own ears, or nose, or their roasted testicles, and yet more were subjected to strange, unheard of martyrdoms that move me too much even to think of, much less describe.
Quote ID: 846
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 167
Section: 3A4C
But Renaissance politics were so volatile that three years after the Sack, Pope Clement not only bestowed public absolution on the invader, he rode to Bologna and crowned Charles V Holy Roman Emperor. It was the last imperial consecration performed by a pope.
Quote ID: 847
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 210/211
Section: 3A2A
Sixtus was both the spiritual authority of a divided church struggling to regain its conviction and its conscience, and the civil authority of a broken city. Fifty years after the Sack, Rome still suffered from a ruined infrastructure, poor transportation, pervasive lawlessness, astronomically high rates of joblessness and crime, and no clean water. Sixtus took on not one but all of these intractable problems.….
He began with lawlessness. According to an old custom, each pope on his consecration day issued a blanket pardon to prisoners in the jails of Rome. Sixtus would have none of it.
….
Instead of pardoning prisoners, he announced, “While I live, every criminal must die,” and ordered one sentence for all offenders: beheading.
Quote ID: 848
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: 246
Section: 1A,2A
Religion is illusion. No institution understands that more profoundly than the Church of Rome. More than tenets and ethics, religion is mystery and magic, the ultimate conjuring act, body and blood from bread and wine. And the gleam of gold, the clouds of incense, the remote elevated person of the pope, the sacred art and evocative music, create that illusion.
Quote ID: 849
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 39 Page: xix
Section: 4B
St. Peter’s consumed the talents—and in some cases the genius—of the greatest artists of the age, among them Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini. They built at the command or whim of a pontiff-patron…
Quote ID: 822
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 39 Page: xviii
Section: 3A4B
The popes who built St. Peter’s also built Rome. They commissioned the fountains and gardens, palaces and pizzas, and from the rubble of a vanished empire created a new city that would be a worthy setting or a Christian imperium.
Quote ID: 821
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes