La terza Loggia, Vatican City

The Canadian Club of Rome was invited today to a lecture on Foreign Relations and the Holy See. This meeting took place on the third floor or Terza Loggia of the Sacred Apostolic Palace where the Pope lives. If on a Sunday morning you are in St-Peter's square you will see the Pope at the window of his apartment deliver his blessings and message to the crowd below. That is the Terza Loggia, it is also the floor where the Secretary of State has his Office. These are the closest advisors to the Pontiff on matters of church affairs and Foreign Relations with other States. I was keen to go and see the area where the Pope lives and walk in the corridor of Church power.

We entered from the St-Anne's Gate and walked to the great courtyard and through an ordinary looking door up a flight of stairs to what is the staff entrance. There you will see Vatican Police manning the door, once through an attendant in the oak paneled elevator takes you up to the third floor, we arrived in this vast corridor decorated with gigantic painted maps of the world showing the world in 1578 when Pope Pius IV had the area decorated. Note that Australia does not appear anywhere, Canada appears in the area of the Saint Lawrence river between what is today Quebec City and Montreal, Land of Cod, where the Saint Lawrence Gulf is. The USA is divided between Mexico and Canada. One map showing the Holy Land in gold leaf is on the left hand side of the door to the Secretary of State Office, each tribe of Israel is identified as they cross the Sinai Desert and you can see the figure of Moses looking at the Holy Land from Madaba. Little men in white carry the Arc of the Covenant towards Jerusalem. Above the entrance door to the Secretary of State, a painting showing God the Father with Christ to his right and the Holy Ghost to his left. Swiss Guards patrol this corridor and though we were guests, we were invited to move along, the Pope's private apartment is just a few steps away. We then went to a little room decorated by Raphael in Roman imperial style with grotesque and unto a terrace with the most incredible view of Rome I have ever seen in this city. We are way up, level with the statues of the facade of St-Peter's Basilica, in the distance you can see the Cathedral of Rome, St-John Lateran, the Pantheon and all the other monuments of the city. Below us the Pope's car waiting to ferry him to a funeral service for Cardinal Tomas Spidlik, a Czech Jesuit scholar, died in Rome on April 16 at the age of 90. He was
a theologian who specialized in the study of the Eastern Christian traditions. We were told not to look down and move along to the other side of the terrace.

In the Palace itself all you can hear is silence and the bells of St-Peter's Basilica clock marking the half-hour and the hour. There are people coming and going but all move in perfect silence. I cannot go into the details of what the lecture was about but it was interesting for what I learned on the Holy See and relations with other Foreign States.
More photos to come a bit later.