21 May 1972, etc.
2002.10.02 20:56
21 May 1972, Pentecost Sunday: Laszlo Toth attacks Michelangelo's Vatican Pieta with 15 blows of a sledgehammer yelling "I am Jesus Christ."
sometime during the reign of Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605):
"According to an eyewitness, a fall of masonry during the construction of the new papal altar caused an unexpected crack to appear in the ground. Della Porta claimed to discern through it an altar older than Callixtus's and, what is more, the very cross of gold laid upon Peter's bronze sarcophagus by St. Helena. The pope, who was at once notified, bustled to the site accompanied by three cardinals. By means of a torch held by the architect, the party were sure that they too saw these things. Clement and his companions were so awed by the spectacle that after a confabulation His Holiness forbade the sepulchre to be disturbed further and commanded the aperture to be filled with cement in his presence.
There are excellent reasons for doubting this picturesque story. In the first place, it is most likely that St. Helena's gold cross and the bronze sarcophagus escaped the Saracen depredations of 846. If they did, and if they were truly seen by Della Porta and Pope Clement VIII, then they must have been rifled and destroyed since. In fact, no untoward events have taken place during the subsequent three and a half centuries up to our own day in which such a disaster could have befallen the sacred treasure of a sanctuary so hidden and well guarded. Furthermore, no mention of the cross and sarcophagus was made by Bernini when in the 1620s he dug the deep foundations for the baldacchino. Nor indeed were there any signs of them when Pope Pius XII's excavators reached the area below Callixtus's altar in the 1940s."
--James Lees-Milne, Saint Peter's: The Story of Saint Peter's Basilica In Rome (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1967), pp. 225-6.
21 May is the Orthodox Catholic feast of Sts. Constantine and Helena, the very individuals that originally built St. Peter's Basilica.
I find it interesting that often signs quickly appear and then quickly disappear.
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