The Vatican Museums house many art treasures — and also simple material artifacts — of Christian antiquity. When I’m old, I hope to have an occasion to take the galleries at a leisurely pace. When I’m on a tight schedule, the exhibits can just overwhelm me: one sarcophagus after another, inscriptions aplenty, row upon row of bald and bearded marble busts, cases stocked with small but exquisite household items … And time’s winged chariot beating near. Still, I wouldn’t trade a minute I’ve spent there for a day in my favorite stateside galleries.

The Museums are marking their 500th birthday this week, and Pope Benedict XVI celebrated the occasion with a special audience. The Vatican’s holdings “are not simply impressive monuments of a distant past,” he said, but represent the Church’s unwavering faith in the beauty of God. According to a Catholic News Service report, the pope

said that … the artistic treasures housed there “stand as a perennial witness to the Church’s unchanging faith in the triune God,” who, according to St. Augustine, is “beauty ever ancient, ever new” …

“In every age Christians have sought to give expression to faith’s vision of the beauty and order of God’s creation, the nobility of our vocation as men and women made in his image and likeness, and the promise of a cosmos redeemed and transfigured by the grace of Christ.”

Get the rest of the story at CNS.

If you think you might be interested in touring the Vatican Museums with me and my colleagues at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, do let me know. With my friends Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Rob Corzine, and others, I’ll be making a pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi in May of 2007. We’ll have guided tours, classes and talks, daily liturgy, and lots of good meals and conversation. Scott’s Roman classes and tours are moments you’ll never forget. Again, if this interests you, drop me a note with your contact information, and I’ll get back to you as soon as the ink is dry on our reservations.