A Man or a Mouse?!

According to a documentary last night on PBS, an excavation of St. Peter's tomb in Rome has yielded the bones of a man, a woman, a boy and a mouse.

They have no idea, of course, whether the man whose bones they found was, indeed, the Big Fisherman. They do know that the bones of the boy, the woman and the mouse belonged to somebody else.

Is it possible that this closely-guarded (and for centuries, hidden) tomb NEVER held the remains of St. Peter? Kinda looks like it.

This does not mean that everything in The Da Vinci Code, for example, is true. The documentary itself pooh-poohed some of the claims made in that novel. (And what is lost on nearly everybody is that Dan Brown, the author himself, insists that it is ONLY a novel.)

It does, however, mean that the Roman church might have taken steps very early on to assure that its bishop was recognized as Peter's successor.

You don't diss the Vatican. Not even to this very day. But the Vatican and its prince, the Pope, still often fall a long way shy of acting like Christ.

I dunno. Maybe I'm better off simply staying at my Lutheran church -- which does welcome me as no other church has.

Jesus welcomes people, too. It definitely seems, to me, that welcoming is the thing the Church should do.

Using Christlike behavior as the standard with which to measure the Church. What a concept!