‘… quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.’

Amplified both by the loudspeaker system and the sonorous acoustics of the great basilica, the celebrant’s voice reverberated with suprahuman authority, seemingly unrelated to the diminutive figure beating his breast like a hammy tenor in some provincial opera house. The fifty or so worshippers who had turned out on this bleak late-November evening were all elderly, and predominantly female. The apse and the chapel of the cattedra, itself a space larger than many churches, had been cordoned off for the service by uniformed attendants, but in other regions of St Peter’s basilica tourists and pilgrims continued to promenade, singly or in groups, dazed by the sheer scale of the sacred and secular claims being made on every side, numbly savouring the bitter taste of their individual insignificance.

For some, the tinkling of the bell, the strains of the organ and the procession of red-clad priest and ministers had come as a welcome relief from these oppressive grandeurs, rather as though afternoon Mass were a dramatic spectacle laid on by the authorities in an attempt to bring this chilly monstrosity to life, a son et lumiere event evoking the religious function it had originally had. Curious as children, they crowded behind the ropes dividing off the apse, gawking at Bernini’s shamelessly showy sunburst and the great papal tombs to either side. For a time the rhythmic cadences of the Latin liturgy held their attention, but during the reading from the Apocalypse of St John many drifted away. Those who remained were fidgety and restless, whispering to each other or rustling through their guide-books.