Rome occupies a place in the Catholic consciousness that no other city in the world can claim, and this centrality is not the result of an arbitrary administrative decision nor of a gradual accumulation of political power, but of a convergence of historical, theological, and spiritual factors that have intertwined over twenty centuries and that together form a reality that is practically impossible to separate into its constituent parts.

The foundation of everything is Peter. According to apostolic tradition, unanimously accepted by the Catholic Church and recognized even by many non-Catholic scholars as historically plausible, the apostle Peter, to whom Christ had given the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and upon whom he had promised to build his Church, arrived in Rome and exercised his ministry there until he was martyred under Emperor Nero around the year 64 or 67. The tradition is ancient and consistent: Clement of Rome, writing at the end of the 1st century, refers to Peter’s martyrdom in Rome. Ignatius of Antioch, writing at the beginning of the 2nd century when addressing his own martyrdom in Rome, treats the Church of Rome with a particular reverence that he does not extend to any other. Irenaeus of Lyons, at the end of the 2nd century, explicitly states that Peter and Paul founded and organized the Church of Rome. Modern archaeology has confirmed the existence of an ancient tomb beneath St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, which has been venerated as the tomb of Peter since at least the 2nd century, and excavations carried out under the basilica’s high altar have uncovered skeletal remains that Pius XII and Paul VI respectively identified as likely belonging to Peter.

This foundational fact, the presence and martyrdom of the prince of the apostles in Rome, is the root of all the theology of the Roman primacy. The theological logic is as follows: Christ conferred upon Peter a special authority over the other apostles and over the entire Church, expressed in the words of the Gospel of Matthew concerning the rock and the keys. This authority was not personal in the sense of being extinguished with Peter’s death, but was an office, a permanent function necessary for the unity and guidance of the Church until the end of time. The bishops of Rome, as successors of Peter in the see he founded and where he shed his blood, inherit this office and therefore exercise in the Church the same function that Peter exercised among the apostles. This reasoning, progressively elaborated over the first centuries, is what the Catholic Church calls the Petrine primacy and which constitutes the ultimate theological reason for the centrality of Rome.

Paul adds a second, equally important dimension. The greatest of evangelists, the one who carried the Gospel throughout the Greco-Roman world and wrote the letters that form the backbone of Christian theology, also came to Rome and was also martyred there, beheaded according to tradition because he was a Roman citizen, while Peter was crucified upside down because he did not have that privilege. The Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls marks the site of his burial. Rome is therefore the city of the two greatest apostles, the two founders of the universal Church, and this double apostolic martyrdom gave the city a consecration of blood that no other Christian city can claim to the same extent. Jerusalem has the Holy Sepulchre, the land where Christ himself lived, died, and rose again, and this gives it absolute primacy in terms of sacred history. But Rome has the blood of the two whom Christ chose to transmit this history to the whole world.

The early centuries established Rome as the natural arbiter of controversies arising in other Churches. When the Christian communities of the East were divided over doctrinal or disciplinary issues, they frequently appealed to Rome for a decision or at least an endorsement that would lend weight to the position of one of the parties. Pope Victor I, at the end of the 2nd century, took a sufficiently authoritative position in the controversy over the date of Easter to threaten excommunication to the Churches of Asia Minor that did not follow Roman practice. Irenaeus of Lyons, although disagreeing with Victor’s attitude as excessively severe, did not question the principle that Rome had the authority to pronounce on the matter. Cyprian of Carthage, in the 3rd century, vigorously defended episcopal collegiality but at the same time recognized that the Church of Rome was the See of Peter and the matrix from which ecclesiastical unity had emanated.

The Edict of Milan in 313 and the subsequent Christianization of the Roman Empire transformed Rome not only into a spiritual center but also into an institutional center of unprecedented proportions. The Christian emperors built a series of basilicas of monumental dimensions in Rome: St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome and therefore called the Mother and Head of all churches in the city and the world; St. Peter’s in the Vatican; St. Paul Outside the Walls; and Santa Maria Maggiore, the first great Marian basilica in the West. These constructions transformed the city’s topography and created a Christian Rome superimposed on pagan Rome, a palimpsest of civilizations and faiths that to this day makes the city unparalleled in terms of historical and spiritual density.

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century and the political structures that had organized the Mediterranean world for centuries disappeared, Rome could have declined into provincial obscurity like so many other ancient cities. What prevented this fate was precisely the presence of the papacy. The popes became the only authority of universal reach that survived the imperial collapse, and Rome thus became the only point of institutional continuity between classical antiquity and the emerging medieval world. Pope Leo I, called the Great, who reigned between 440 and 461, was the figure who most clearly embodied this transition. It was he who, in 452, went to meet Attila, the Hun leader who threatened to sack Rome, and persuaded him to withdraw, in a scene that tradition has portrayed as a miracle and which in practice revealed that the pope was the only leader capable of representing the city and negotiating on its behalf. It was also Leo who developed the most systematic theology of the Roman primacy up to that point, arguing with legal and theological precision that the Bishop of Rome was not just one bishop among others, but the heir and vicar of Peter, with authority over the entire Church.

The city itself, regardless of its ecclesiastical function, is a physical and visual testament to the continuity and grandeur of the Catholic tradition. To enter Rome is to enter a city where every street, every square, every hill holds overlapping layers of sacred and secular history. The Colosseum, where according to tradition Christians were martyred, although modern historians debate the precise extent of this use, is a few steps from the Arch of Constantine, which commemorates the emperor who liberated the Christians. The Roman Forum, where for centuries the power of the pagan Senate was exercised, stands alongside ancient churches that transformed pagan temples into places of Christian worship. The Pantheon, the best-preserved of the buildings of Ancient Rome, is today the Church of Santa Maria dei Martiri and houses the tombs of Raphael and the kings of Italy. This incessant superimposition of pagan and Christian, of ancient and medieval, and baroque and modern, is not a confusion but a synthesis that visually expresses what Catholicism is: a faith that did not destroy the cultures it evangelized but transformed them from within, incorporating what was true and beautiful and directing it towards God.

The Vatican, a city-state of just over forty-four hectares nestled within Rome, is the visible administrative and spiritual heart of this centrality. St. Peter’s Square, designed by Bernini in the 17th century with its colonnades that open like welcoming arms, is possibly the most symbolically charged urban space in the entire Christian world. In the center of the square stands the Egyptian obelisk that was in the circus of Caligula and Nero, the same place where, according to tradition, Peter was crucified. This detail is almost unbearably eloquent: the instrument of torture of the pagan tyrant became the marker of the place where the first pope shed his blood, and around this same obelisk Bernini built the largest reception area in the world, as if all of history had converged there and the arms of the Church opened to embrace all of humanity that came on pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostle.

St. Peter’s Basilica itself is a work that demands its own reflection. The current building, constructed over more than a century between 1506 and 1626, involving the greatest artistic geniuses of the Renaissance and Baroque periods—Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Maderno, Bernini—is simultaneously a work of art of cosmic dimensions and a confession of architectural faith. Michelangelo’s dome, which dominates the Roman skyline and has been the model for countless church domes throughout the world, rises directly above what tradition identifies as the tomb of Peter. The high altar, Bernini’s work with its twenty-nine-meter-high bronze baldachin, is also positioned above this point. The entire monumental scale of the building converges on that subterranean point where the bones of a Galilean fisherman, executed as a criminal by the most formidable imperial power of Antiquity, rest as the foundation of one of the greatest institutions that human history has known.

The Roman catacombs are another dimension of this spiritual grandeur. Beneath the city streets, in a network of tunnels carved into volcanic tuff stretching for hundreds of kilometers, the Christians of the first centuries buried their dead and celebrated the Eucharist beside the tombs of the martyrs. The catacombs of Saint Callixtus, Saint Sebastian, Priscilla, and Domitilla are subterranean archives of the early faith, where one can still see the first Christian representations of Christ as the Good Shepherd, of the apostles, of the Virgin with Child, and where the inscription of names, dates, and expressions of faith painted on the walls by the Christians themselves in the 2nd and 3rd centuries constitutes a human document of incomparable immediacy. Visiting the catacombs is an experience that no reading can replace, because the silence, the darkness, and the physical proximity to those who died for their faith create a temporal continuity that the rational mind resists processing.

The seven principal churches of Rome, whose pilgrimage route was organized by Saint Philip Neri in the 16th century and is still practiced today on the eve of Ash Wednesday, reveal another dimension of the city’s spiritual richness. St. John Lateran, St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, St. Paul Outside the Walls, St. Mary Major, St. Lawrence Outside the Walls, Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and St. Sebastian: each of these basilicas holds relics, apostolic and martyrial memories, and devotional traditions that have accumulated over centuries. Holy Cross in Jerusalem holds fragments of the True Cross and the titulus, the inscribed tablet placed above Christ’s head at the crucifixion, brought to Rome according to tradition by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine, in the 4th century. St. Mary Major holds relics from the manger of Bethlehem in its high altar and possesses an apse mosaic and mosaics in the nave from the 5th century that are among the oldest and most beautiful in Western Christian art.

Rome is also the city of councils and dogmas. Although the great ecumenical councils of Antiquity were held in the East, from the Middle Ages onwards the Lateran Councils, held in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, became the instruments for defining the doctrine and discipline of the Western Church. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, convened by Innocent III at the height of medieval papal power, was possibly the most important ecclesiastical assembly of the medieval period, defining, among other things, the doctrine of transubstantiation, establishing the obligation of annual confession and Easter communion, and addressing a series of disciplinary issues that shaped Catholic life for centuries. The Councils of Trent and Vatican I, although held in other cities, were convened and presided over by Roman authority, and their decrees were promulgated by the Pope.

Rome’s tradition of holiness is another dimension of its spiritual importance. The city is not only the administrative capital of the Church but a field of holiness where, in each century, figures have emerged who have renewed Christian life and left lasting marks on Catholic spirituality. Saint Philip Neri, the 16th-century apostle of Rome, founded the Oratory and transformed the city’s religious life with his style of joy, humility, and informal community life. Saint Francesca Romana, from the 15th century, cared for the city’s poor and founded a community of oblates that still exists. Saint Camillus de Lellis, from the 16th century, dedicated his life to the sick in Rome’s hospitals and founded the order that gave rise to the Red Cross. Saint Catherine of Siena, although a native of Siena, lived her last years in Rome, where she came to convince Pope Gregory XI to return from Avignon, and died there in 1380, and is today co-patron saint of Europe. These saints were not merely figures of individual piety but reformers who used Rome as a base to transform the Church and society.

The Gregorian University, founded by the Jesuits in the 16th century from the college created by Saint Francis Borgia and Saint Philip Neri himself, has become over the centuries the largest center of theological and philosophical formation in Catholicism, training bishops, theologians, and priests from all over the world. The presence in Rome of the National Colleges, where seminarians from each nation go to complete their formation in direct contact with the Roman Curia and the sacred sites of Christendom, creates a network of personal bonds between Rome and the local Churches throughout the world that no purely bureaucratic administrative system could replace. A bishop who studied in Rome, who walked through the catacombs, who celebrated Mass on the tomb of Peter, who was ordained in the apostolic basilicas, carries with him a relationship with Rome that is simultaneously intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.

The Jubilee, or Holy Year, is an institution that reveals how Rome was deliberately constructed as a universal center of pilgrimage. Created by Boniface VIII in 1300, the Jubilee calls upon the faithful from all over the world to come to Rome, to visit the apostolic basilicas, and to receive a special plenary indulgence. The first Jubilee attracted such impressive crowds that medieval chroniclers described the city as unable to absorb the number of pilgrims. Since then, the regular Holy Years every twenty-five years and the extraordinary jubilees have become moments of spiritual renewal for the entire Church, with Rome as its stage and focal point. The idea that coming to Rome, making a pilgrimage to the tomb of Peter, and receiving the blessing of his successor is an act of special spiritual significance is deeply rooted in the Catholic consciousness and has remained intact through the centuries since the Middle Ages.

The Latin expression Urbs et Orbis, “the city and the world,” used to designate the solemn papal blessing, captures in three words the essence of what Rome represents for Catholicism. Rome is not simply the capital of a global religious organization. It is the meeting point between the particular and the universal, between history and eternity, between the rock upon which Christ promised to build his Church and the limitless horizon to which that Church was sent. It is the city where the blood of the apostles mingled with the earth, where the catacombs hold the bones of the first martyrs, where the basilicas accumulate fifteen centuries of art and devotion, where the successor of Peter sits in the same spiritual chair that a Galilean fisherman occupied two thousand years ago. For all this, Rome is not for Catholicism a choice among other possibilities. It is a historical and theological necessity that Providence itself seems to have prepared even before Peter arrived there.