Lowest Price Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter's

The book is a great romp through 200 critical years of European history using the building of St. Peter's as the focus. It is entirely readable, entertaining, and revelatory.

Ms. Scotti gets the basics right as implied in her subtitle, "The Splendor and The Scandal." Her story leaves us with the question, "How can we divorce ethics from beauty?"

Whether or not the building of St. Peter's caused the Protestant Reformation, the author counterposes the absolute corruption responsible for the construction of the Basilica. While she correctly states that modern historians are kinder to the Renaissance popes than were critics of their own day (such as Erasmus), she leaves no doubt about the immense personal ambition and lust for power that motivated the construction of St. Peter's.

The book gives us a good insight into the unbelievable scale of corruption of the Renaissance Church, with its clergy brazenly using spiritual powers for material and personal gain. For example, Ms. Scotti gives us a brief but vivid picture of Pope Julius II leading his troops and an army of cardinals and clergy in his military campaign to re-take the Papal States, brandishing threats of excommunication and interdict.

I first visited St. Peter's in 1980 as a Catholic priest, suspended for publishing my book, The Human Church, which called for the democratization of the Church. In the book I argued that there was no theological reason why the Church had to be set up on monarchical lines like the Roman government. Democracy would be much more amenable to its purpose and mission. As history has repeatedly shown, the monarchical, top-down, structure is both corrupt and corrupting.

I found St. Peter's immense and awesome, but I did not find it beautiful. That, and all the fountains and monuments around Rome constructed by popes, I saw as tribute to their quest for personal power and empire. Their breathtaking arrogance is reflected in the inscription across the facade of St. Peter's: "IN HONOR OF THE PRINCE OF THE APOSTLES PAUL V BORGHESE BY NAME SUPREME ROMAN PONTIFF 1612 SEVENTH YEAR OF HIS PONTIFICATE."

The popes whose portraits Ms. Scotti paints are often larger-than-life people of often immense energy and brilliance who used the project of St. Peter's, not only as an answer to the Protestants, but also as the focus of building of a new Rome, which had been devastated by neglect and the sack of the city in 1527. While they may have been effective as CEOs, we have to ask, as Luther asked, "Is that really their job?"

The fact that St. Peter's still functions as the symbol of the Roman Church shows there is much more reform that remains to be done.
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