The Vatican.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 15, 10 April 1902, Page 6

The Vatican.

The Rome correspondent of the Chicago Record, a spcular newspaper, in the course of an interesting sketch of the Papal Secretary of State, gives the following particulars of the Vatican : — Cardinal Rampolla, next to the Holy Father, the greatest man in the C itholic Church to-day, lives at the top of the Vatican, and his visitors are required to climb 463 marble stairs. There are no elevators ii that venerable building, although it has be j n fitted with electric lights at a cost of 45,000 dols. It looks queer to have a cluster of electric bulbs hanging over an altar, but you can see this anomaly at the head-quarters of the Catholic Church. The Pope, who j e apartments are immediately below those of Cardinal Rampolla, is carried up and down stairß in a sedan chair by four of his guards, who handle him as tenderly as if he were an infant. Everybody else has to walk, and it is a long hard journey. When I su/geeted to an eminent prelate that the climb to the top of the Vatican ought to be counted as a penance, he smiled and said that he knew of a good many people who would be glad to get rid of tatir sins in that way.

The Vatican is not a single buildinsr, but, an accumulation of buildings stretching over an area of thirteen and one-lialf acres They were begun about the year 300, ond have grown gradually. The outside length of the wall is 1151 feet in one direction and 787 feet in the other, but they are joined by lower walls, which enclnt-e a large garden and park that contains two or three villas in whi< h his Holiness takes refuge during the heat of the summer The Pontiff drives in the park daily when the weather will permit, and with its winding walks and roads it is large enough to give him a variety of scenery, as well as plenty of freeh air and exercise. Since 1870 the Pope has been practically a prisoner within the walls of his palace, surrounded by Cardinals and the other functionaries of the Church inviolable and inviolate, for the Italian Parliament, when it deprived him of temporal authority extended to his Holiness what is known in diplnn.atic circles as the doctrine of ' extra-territorial ity ' over the building and the pirk. In ether words, whatever occurs withiu its limits is und-r the jansilictiun of the Pope alone.

Civil authority does not exfr-nd beyond the portals of the Vatican, and that limited area, perhaps thirty acres in all, is still under the temporal as well as the ecclesiastical authority of the Pontiff. No civil officer can enter the Vatican to make an arrest or to serve a legal pap^r or to exercise any other form of civil authority Its precincts are inviolate, and no one, whatever his creed, can look upon that monstrous building, inhabited for so many centuries by the venerable men who have exeicised so great an irfluence and borne so important a put in the history of the world without the deepest of interes\ Eight grand staircases an I 200 smaller ones lead to the upper apartments of Ihe building, the hiyhet-h of the great conglomeration being seven storey* from the grou nd. There are. 20 courtß and 17 chapels for various dignitaTHs the chief of which is the Sistine Chapel, where the Pope offers M a^s on special ociasion.a, and which is also famous for the frescoes o f Mishatil An»elo, and his greatest painting representing ' The Last Judgment.' This picture is in very bad condition, owing to the dampness a*d the cracking of the walls,so that pome parts of it can no longer bedi^tinguished. There are 1000 halls and corridors in the Vatican and 11,000 rooms, counting everything and quart rs for ihe Svvio Guards, the stables for the horses, the store houses for the gardeners' tools, the mosaic factory, and other workshops, and it is said that an average of 2200 people are employed under the roof, most of them being lodged there.