Water Color of San Pietro

When Susie from Recon returned from Rome, she sent Prodigal Daughter and I this beautiful little water color rendering of Saint Peter's Basilica viewed from across the Tiber River. Am I more excited about Rome than Jerusalem one might ask? I certainly would love to see the Holy Land someday, but knowing that Peter's successors have been in Rome since the early days of Christianity gives me a sense of history that I hadn't appreciated before. To be able to still see the chains that bound St. Peter and the remains of St. Ignatius (A disciple of St. John) suggests to me that the gates of hell certainly have not prevailed. I had previously thought that the Catholic Church had "gone off the rails" shortly after the apostles died and laid dormant or invisible until the 16th Century. The historicity and continued visibility of Catholicism as represented by St. Peter's is what gets us reverts and converts energized. We see a Church that we believe has been "set on a hill" that can historically trace itself to the apostles. Catholics believe that there has been spiritual, physical, and historical continuity with the same Church that the early Church fathers proclaimed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic.
These photos and paintings of St. Pete's are so meaningful to me because they are visual metaphors of my *new* discovery of ancient history. The Tiber River represents the sometimes difficult "crossing over" process of conversion/reversion as many sojourners since the time of Constantine have experienced.