The Fresco is located on the north wall of the Sixtine Chapel, up and right while the cardinals enter to choose their successor. It shows a scene from the life of Jesus, as told in the Gospel of Matthew, painted by the Italian Renaissance artist Pietro Perugino in the 15th century.
Jesus, dressed in blue, is just left of the middle with his disciples in an open Piazza, a temple in the background. Exactly to the right of the center, his disciple Peter kneels and reaches up to take what Jesus hands over him, the object of ultimate importance, indicated by the placement in the exact center of the painting.
The keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.
“I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and what binds you on earth will be bound in heaven, and what you lose on earth will be detached in heaven,” Jesus Peter says in the gospel story.
In those words, one of the most sustainable symbols in Christianity, the keys of St. Peter, was made and the story of papacy was born.
When the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church gathered for the conclave on Wednesday, they were more than just casting votes for the next head of state of the Vatican. She chose the 267th successor to St. Peter, who, as the ecclesiastical tradition teaches, was chosen by Jesus as the first leader of the church.
“People, especially now, they say:” Well, who is the pope? Is he like the CEO, or is he like the chairman of the board? “” Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan van New York said in an interview at Kennedy Airport, Before boarding his flight to Rome After Pope Francis died. “No. He is a successor to St. Peter, and he is the bishop of Rome.”
Choosing a pope is a political process, but also a deep theological one. The symbolic death of the keys is one of the oldest rituals in Christianity.
The image of two crossed keys is an old sign of papal authority. They are omnipresent in the Vatican. They are crossed in the weapon of the Holy chair, one gold and one silver. They are on the post-stamp of the Special-Edition Vatican stamp, currently marked with ‘sede vacant MMXXV’, published for the period between the death of Pope Francis and the elections of his successor, and currently so popular they are limited to one magazine per customer.
In St. Peter’s Basilica, a bronze statue of St. Peter holds the keys in his left hand and outside on the square, a gigantic statue of St. Peter grabs them in his right side.
Just as Jesus changed the name of Peter of Simon, the new pope changes his name and almost becomes a new person in the eyes of the church, Cardinal Dolan explained. The person with the keys has the power that Jesus had to preserve and pass on the integrity of faith.
“Peter’s successor has no armies to turn, no weapons to sell, not to change currency, no trade, no rates to impose,” said Kardinal Dolan. “Yet he has this great moral authority and spiritual authority that you can see the world craving.”
Nowadays, the Pope’s office is generally seen as one of the moral authority. But the papacy, and the meaning of the keys, changed over the centuries as the political and theological of the church could shift.
In early Christianity, the keys were largely a theological symbol of forgiveness, and that by giving Peter the keys, offered Jesus to people. Metaphorically they unlock the gates of heaven and eternal life.
Images of Peter with the keys do not appear before the 4th century, when Constantine, the Roman emperor, converted to Christianity, and the faith became legal.
“The emphasis is currently on the status of Peter as a direct recipient of Christ’s authority, and that happens at a time when the church settles as a religion in the empire,” said Felicity Harley-McGowan, an art history teacher at the Yale Divinity School. “In Rome, those images get a special meaning in terms of articulating, ultimately, the authority of the church.”
The first known image of Christ to hand over the keys to Peter is in Rome, hidden a quiet path behind a school, in the grave of the daughter of Constantijn, who died in the 4th century.
Inside is the grave, known as the Mausolo di Santa Costanza, cool and dark, away from the blazing Roman sun. In an Apse, near the location of the sarcophagus, there is a sparkling mosaic of Jesus in reddish and golden robes that are on top of the ball of the world. In his right hand he gives Peter a key.
Coumba Sall, a guide, was practicing there to add the site to its route. She pointed to the motives of grapes and Roman winemakers around the apsis and noted that for Christians wine is a memory of the Eucharist. Jesus, she said, was washed in imperial colors.
“These mosaics show us the transition from pagan to Christianity,” she said.
In Egypt, in the old Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, there is an icon of Peter holding the keys from the 6th century, which was used in devotional practices.
The keys are heavy – they are made of metal – but they are less about earthly power and submission than about Christian dedication, said father Gabriel Torretta, a university teacher of theology at Providence College and a Dominican priest.
“This is Christian hope that you are looking,” he said. “Because Peter has the keys, you look at hope, there is forgiveness of sins and I can be united with Jesus Christ in eternal life.”
During the medieval period, the papal authority was concrete as the pope obtained sovereignty about territory or papal states. The Pope received real keys from conquered cities through some church accounts.
“People see the power of this and determine a completely different mode, where it is now political and military,” said Father Torretta.
Because of the Renaissance, when Perugino created his fresco in the Sixtine chapel, not only more visuals from Jesus and Peter, but of them with all the other disciples. Artificial scholars say that this was a sign that the church began to emphasize papal follow -up in their social and political environment.
Pope Francis explained his own understanding of the keys last June, preaching the gospel text from the window with a view of St. Peter’s Square.
They represent ‘the Ministry of Authority that Jesus has entrusted to him in the service of the entire church,’ he said, carefully describe how to interpret ‘authority’.
“Authority is a service,” he said, “and authority that is not a service is dictatorship.”
It is remarkable that Pope Francis, the person at the top of the power structure of the church, was concerned about the moral boundaries of that authority, explained Molly Farneth, a associate professor of religion at Haverford College.
“I think Francis has recognized this distinction and wanted to be a good and virtuous leader,” she said, “and also tried to prevent the one who had taken the role of the pope in a way that dominated.”
Mrs Farneth gives a course about the politics of the ritual, and sees this politics playing in real time when one papacy ends and another starts to start.
“It is interesting to consider a key as the symbol of this transition of power, and raises all these questions,” she said, like the person occupying the office, using the keys to open the door so that more people can come in? Will they use it to regulate border crossings? “The person who has the key has a lot of power about who is in the community,” she said, “and who from the community is.”
These questions – and the earthly and heavenly power they have – form the core of the decision of the cardinals in the coming days, because they choose the 267th successor to St. Peter. And it is not only the Perugino -Fresco and the Gospel of Matthew text that remind them of the import of what they do.
Their ritual includes a conclave, which takes place in the secret of the Sixtine Chapel. “Conlave” itself is derived from a Latin sentence – which means, “with key.”
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