humidity. This wall was later covered by red plaster. The original burial
place of St. Peter was also walled off to protect it from injury and the
outside world, to become lost for the next 1600 years.
In 1506 it was decided, due to subsidence and decay, to replace the old
church built by Constantine with a grand new basilica. In 1626, Bernini,
testing the floor over St. Peter’s burial place for the erection of his weighty
baldacchino, came across numerous skeletons. These skeletons were
arranged like spokes of a wheel, pointing to a central spot under the high
altar.
More than three hundred years later, Pope Pius XII, in March 1939, ordered
excavations under St. Peter’s to find “the foundations of our faith.” In a
radio broadcast on 23rd December 1950, the Pope announced to the world
that the original tomb of St. Peter had been discovered. It lay 25 feet
beneath the high altar and was decorated with Christian mosaics, one of a
fisherman with a rod, one of the Good Shepherd, and another of Jonah and
the whale.
However, the bones of St. Peter (as opposed to his tomb) still remained
missing. Doctor Margherita Guarducci, a professor of Greek epigraphy,
noticed that during the excavations for the tomb pieces of red plaster
chipped off a nearby wall (Wall G) had Greek inscriptions carved on them.
The Greek letters “pe” in the form of a monogram appeared on every line
of the wall. By chance, on 2nd August, 1951, a Jesuit excavator, Father
Antonio Ferrua, noticed a piece 1 x 3 inches in size, with the words “Petros
eni” (Peter is inside) on it and put it into his pocket and took it home.
When Pius XII heard of this he ordered the Jesuit to return the fragment.
Wall G also included many other references to St. Peter, accompanied by
the names of Jesus and Mary, the letters “pe” joined in the form of a key,
and the name of Peter intersected by the names of Jesus and Mary. All this
indicated that the bones of St. Peter could not be far away.
In fact, about 10 years earlier, in 1942, an excavator named Giovanni
Segoni had emptied the niche in Wall G. Included in the material collected
were bones that were dusted and freed from the other rubble. Without
informing the excavators, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, the administrator of St.
Peter’s Basilica, had the bones put into a wooden box and stored, first, in a
damp area of the underground grotto and then in a cupboard of a basilica
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