St Peters

Next it was off to St Peters around the corner from the Vatican museum. We jumped into line to climb the stairs up the dome. We got to the first level inside the roof and looked out onto the rest of the church. This was my first glimpse of the inside and the place is just stupidly large ... it is just speechless about the size of it.

Quick history lesson. The church had this great scam going whereby the Saints were so good that when they got into heaven, the church got their residual extra 'goodness'. They would then sell it as 'indulgences' to the faithful making an absolute fortune. Then in 1519 there was this guy called Martin Luther who bought the whole thing to a halt.

He was a devote monk, would spend 6 hours in confession but never felt cleansed of his sins. He saw the money making scam and the short of it is that the church then split into the Catholic and Protestant lines that we see today - all because of one little dude (assisted by the rise of printmaking - but that is another story).

Relevance here, after the church started fracturing, the 'empire' of the catholic church started to hit back (see reformation / counter reformation in history books for more info). The catholic church did this visually and aggressively (protestants found this funny thing in the 10 commandments saying 'thou shall not worship graven images'). So St Peters is the result of this visual striking back.

It is that big and extragent, while wonderful to look at, sickening to thing of the hypocracy involve.