POPE LEO XIV HAS MOVED BACK INTO THE WHITE HOUSE, I MEAN, THE APOSTOLIC PALACE PROVIDED BY HOLY MOTHER CHURCH FOR POPES TO LIVE AS THE USA PROVIDES THE WHITE HOUSE FOR PRESIDENTS TO LIVE, BUT WHEN WILL SAINT POPE PETER I MOVE BACK INTO THE APOSTOLIC PALACE?

 I was a concelebrant with Pope Francis at the Closing Mass for the Year of Faith on November 24, 2013 and I also distributed Holy Communion!

The first five photos I took before the Closing Mass of the Year of Faith on November 24, 2013:

I pray that Pope Leo will return to this contraption for the Introductory and Concluding Rites of papal Masses in St. Peter’s Square. This particular set-up was Pope Benedict’s which Pope Francis had maintained his first year but slightly modified later:

I was blessed to be on a nearly four month sabbatical at the North American College in Rome from August 2013 through November 2013. Pope Francis had been pope for only five months when I arrived and because it was the Year of Faith, His Holiness celebrated many Solemn Masses in a packed St.Peter’s Square. I was able to concelebrate and distribute Holy Communion at many of those Masses and I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. What wonderful memories!

I concelebrated Mass with Pope Francis for the Closing Mass of the Year of Faith on November 24, 2013. I also distributed Holy Communion. 

At this Mass, the relics of Saint Peter, which were kept in the Apostolic Palace where popes had lived but Pope Francis chose not to live, but rather he lived at the Vatican Motel 6, were on public display. In addition to that, Pope Francis held the reliquary containing St. Pope Peter’s bones for the chanting of the Credo. It was powerful to be there and witness such a historical spectacle and to be concelebrating that Mass with the pope and St. Peter!

I would be located to the left of the altar to concelebrate this Mass, directly behind the bishops maybe one or two rows behind them. I think I am at the end closest to the square:

Father Raymond de Souza writing for the National Catholic Register, asks when these same relics of Saint Peter will move back into the papal apartment’s chapel. I did not know that Pope Francis had given these relics, the bones of St. Peter, to the Patriarch of Constantinople of the schismatic Eastern Orthodox Church.

This is what Father de Souza writes:

There is the issue of the private chapel, in which were kept small pieces of the bones of the Apostle Peter. Among the most precious relics in the possession of the Holy See, some bone fragments were kept in the Pope’s private chapel for his veneration. 

In 1968, the relics of St. Peter were archaeologically determined to be under the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica. The majority of the bones found were left on-site. But Paul VI took nine small fragments and placed them in a special reliquary, which he kept in the chapel in the papal apartment. He desired that the Successor of Peter’s daily prayer be nourished by the corporeal presence of the Prince of the Apostles and that Peter’s relics would protect the pope and his ministry.

His successors maintained the custom, never removing the reliquary for public veneration. Pope Francis exposed the relics for public veneration at the conclusion of the Year of Faith in November 2013, after which they remained in the private chapel of the papal apartment. 

In 2019, having given the idea less than 24 hours’ consideration by his own account, he gave the relics to the delegation representing Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, at the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul in “I no longer live in the Apostolic Palace, I never use this chapel, I never serve the Holy Mass here, and we have St. Peter’s relics in the basilica itself, so it will be better if [these relics] will be kept in Constantinople,” Pope Francis said when presenting his gift to the astonished delegation. “This is my gift to the Church of Constantinople. Please take this reliquary and give it to my brother Patriarch Bartholomew. This gift is not from me; it is a gift from God.”

Now that Pope Leo XIV is back in the papal apartment, it remains for him to quietly indicate that the relics of Peter belong back in the pope’s chapel. It is likely that Bartholomew would agree, and the transfer could be arranged in June, when his delegation makes its annual Roman visit for Peter and Paul. 

That the Pope didn’t live in the papal apartment for 12 years was an anomaly that the Holy Father has now corrected. That Peter himself has been absent remains to be corrected.

Father Raymond J. de Souza Father Raymond J. de Souza is the founding editor of Convivium magazine.