Saint Paul Outside the Walls

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The Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls — San Paolo fuori le Mura — is one of the four major papal basilicas of Rome, standing on the ancient road to Ostia roughly two kilometres beyond the line of the Aurelian wall, the boundary that gives the church its name. It is built over a site venerated since antiquity as the grave of the apostle Paul, executed at Rome under Nero and, by the tradition the church preserves, buried at this spot by his followers.

A first small shrine raised by Constantine in the early fourth century was soon judged too modest for the apostle. Under the emperors Valentinian II, Theodosius I, and Honorius the building was replaced, in the years around 386 and after, by a vast five-aisled basilica that became the largest church in the city — larger, until the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s, than any rival. For some fifteen centuries that late-antique structure stood, its long nave lined with columns and, in a frieze above them, a continuous series of papal portraits running from Peter onward. In July 1823 a workman’s fire destroyed almost the whole of it. The basilica seen today is a nineteenth-century reconstruction on the old plan and to the old scale, raised by international subscription; fragments of the earlier building, including the Gothic ciborium over the high altar and a great late-twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century paschal candlestick, survive within it.

Beneath that altar lies the object of the cult: a stone sarcophagus inscribed PAULO APOSTOLO MART — “to Paul, apostle and martyr.” Excavations carried out in the early twenty-first century confirmed an undisturbed Roman-era burial in the expected place, of a date consistent with the tradition; what the bones are cannot, of course, be established, but the continuity of veneration on the site is among the best documented in Rome. The church is one of the goals of the pilgrim circuit of the city’s principal basilicas, and the place where, by long custom, the year’s reading of Saint Paul’s letters is marked.

Roman Catholic devotion holds the basilica to be built directly over the apostle’s relics, so that the altar stands at the meeting of the living church and its founding generation — the bond between the present hierarchy and the apostolic age made architecture. Historians treat the identification of the tomb more cautiously, while granting that the location was already fixed and honoured by the time Constantine built. What is not in dispute is the endurance: through fire, flood, and reconstruction, the worship has remained at the one spot, which is what such a church was raised to guarantee.

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