Christus Vincit. “Christ wins.” This is the amazing, ecstatic, sometimes almost unbelievable truth of Easter.
It’s also the truth captured in this photo from a recent “Year of Faith” pilgrimage I helped lead to Rome. It was taken in St. Peter’s Square and it shows the statue of St. Peter from behind, looking toward the towering obelisk that marks the center of the square about 100 yards away.
It turns out Peter would have good reason to be gazing at that obelisk, and with a sense of irony. He’d seen it before, on the day of his martyrdom.
You see, the obelisk had been plucked from Egypt by the Roman Emperor Caligula in 37 AD, a trophy of Roman power. He had placed it in the center of his “circus,” or arena. It was in this very circus that the Emperor Nero, beginning in 64 AD, would make a public sport of torturing and killing Christians, scapegoating them for a fire that had devastated Rome.
