St. John Lateran Church

This is a story about steps—very special steps. They lead up to the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, the cathedral church of the pope, bishop of Rome. We’ll get to those steps in a moment. But first, some background.

St. John Lateran’s Basilica was built over a military fort that had been built in A.D. 193. After the battle at Milvian Bridge, the fort was demolished by troops of the Emperor Constantine, and a few years later, in 313, Constantine gave the site to the bishop of Rome.

One of the many wonders of this church is an Egyptian obelisk. It was originally at the temple of Karnak at Thebes, and it was built by Pharaoh Thutmose IV. Constantine claimed it as he made his way through Egypt and sent it back to Rome. He’d actually intended it to go to Constantinople, but his son wasn’t paying that much attention when the orders were given, and instead, it was loaded—all 455 tons of it—on a ship and sent to Rome. In the 350s, it was set up outside of the Circus Maximus, and over the centuries it slowly sank into the ground. Eventually, it was dug up, and in 1588 it was installed in front of the Lateran Basilica.

This church also has a significant set of sculptures of the original twelve disciples. It also has a statue of Moses with horns coming out of his head. The peculiar depiction is the result of a mistranslation by Jerome, who compiled the Latin Vulgate. As Moses came off of the mountain after receiving the Ten Commandments, the text says his face “shone.” Jerome mistranslated the Hebrew there and rendered it as saying that Moses’ head “had horns.” And so throughout the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, many depictions of Moses show him with horns on his head.

But the piece at the St. John Lateran church that is the most interesting are the steps called the scala sancta, or the “sacred steps.” They were Pilate’s steps, which Jesus climbed as He went to face trial before Pilate on the eve of His death. Constantine’s mother, Helena, was a very devout Christian, and Constantine had significant resources at his disposal, so he had these steps, the scala sancta, deconstructed, labeled, put on a ship, and shipped from Jerusalem all the way to Rome, and then reconstructed at the St. John Lateran church.

When Luther made his pilgrimage to Rome in 1510, he went to St. John Lateran’s Basilica. St. Peter’s Basilica was just being built. Eventually, the focus would shift from the Lateran church to St. Peter’s as the main church of the Roman Catholic communion, but in Luther’s day, it was St. John Lateran’s church. So, Luther, like all the pilgrims who come to Rome in his day and for the centuries before, knelt down and went up and down the steps on his knees. It was said that on certain steps, you could almost see drops of Christ’s blood. And if you stopped at one of those spots and prayed the rosary, a certain number of years would be taken off of your time in purgatory, or you could even free one of your relatives from purgatory. Luther, however, didn’t have the typical reaction when he reached the top of the steps. Instead of feeling awe or relief, he was utterly disillusioned with the Roman Catholic Church, and all he could do was simply mumble to himself, “Who knows if this is true?”

But Luther’s story doesn’t end there, by God’s grace. In later years, he came up against the Roman church and received the assurance that neither he nor the multitudes of pilgrims could achieve on the steps of St. John Lateran’s Basilica.