I am currently working my way through the late Rev. Alexander Hislop's "The Two Babylons." I just read a section about "St. Peter's Chair." I didn't even know that the RCC asserted that such a thing existed (you can view a picture of it
here, via the Catholic encyclopedia).
I doubled over with laughter when I read that during a cleaning, they discovered the "twelve labours of Hercules," inscribed on it and sadly, did not fare much better with the "replacement chair" when they discovered...well, I don't want to spoil it for you - here's the quote from page 194:
Quote:The real pedigree of the far-famed chair of Peter will appear from the following fact: "The Romans had," says Bower, " as they thought, till the year 1662, a pregnant proof, not only of Peter's erecting their chair, but of his sitting in it himself; for, till that year, the very chair on which they believed, or would make others believe, he had sat, was shown and exposed to public adoration on the 18th of January, the festival of the said chair. But while it was cleaning, in order to set it up in some conspicuous place of the Vatican, the twelve labours of Hercules unluckly appeared on it!" and so it had to be laid aside. The partisans of the Papacy were not a little disconcerted by this discovery; but they tried to put the best face on the matter they could. "Our worship," said Giacomo Bartolini, in his Sacred Antiquites of Rome, while relating the circumstances of the discovery, Our worship, however, was not misplaced, since it was not to the wood we paid it, but to the prince of the apostles, St. Peter," that had been supposed to sit in it. Whatever the reader may think of this apology for chair-worship, he will surely at least perceive, taking this in connection with what we have already seen, that the hoary fable of Peter's chair is fairly exploded. In modern times, Rome seems to have been rather unfortunate in regard to Peter's chair; for, even after that which bore the twelve labours of Hercules had been condemned and cast aside, as unfit to bear the light that the Reformation had pured upon the darkness of the Holy See, that which was chosen to replace it was destined to reveal still more ludicrously the barefaced impostures of the Papacy. The former chair was borrowed from the Pagans; the next appears to have been purloined from the Mussulmans (Muslims); for when the French soldiers under General Bonaparte took possession of Rome in 1795, they found on the back of it, in Arabic, this well known sentence from the Koran, "There is no God but God, and Mahomet (Mohammed) is His Prophet."
If you should feel nostalgic for the chair and lament its loss, don't despair, the RCC still sets aside a feast day for the "Chair of the Apostle Peter." I am not making this up - you can view a page about it from a Catholic site
here. And while you're there, don't forget to "send a Saint an EGreeting" via the convenient link they have provided.
When I wonder how things got so screwed up and how/why people are so gullible, I remember something that my brother-in-law had heard once from a used car salesman: "there's an @ss for every seat."
Yep, I was one for quite a few years - sure glad I found YY.
Edited by user Thursday, November 29, 2007 11:33:50 PM(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified