Word from the Cloisters

22 July 2026, The Tablet

Asked by the Catholic Union to provide a reflection for the feast of Ss Peter and Paul to top its excellent weekly briefing (you can sign up to receive it free here: catholicunion.org.uk/weekly-briefings), Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth began by recounting something of the story of the excavations in the early 1940s under St Peter’s in Rome. The archaeologists found a casket, he tells us, inscribed “Petrou”, inside which were the bones of a circa 60-year-old Palestinian man who had been crucified upside down. “It makes you tingle with excitement,” he wrote.

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