Prime Matters

Da Vinci portrays a youthful Baptist, leaning into the light to invite the viewer's gaze to heaven.

Michelangelo's Pietà captures a serene moment of surrender, as the Virgin Mary cradles the body of her crucified son in her lap.

The massive obelisk standing in the center of St. Peter’s Square is likely the last thing St. Peter saw as he died upon the cross.

Like all things genuinely Christian, the ancient Monastery of Mar Saba has been no stranger to conflict and controversy as it has borne witness to the Gospel throughout the ages.

Pilgrims have ascended Mount Tabor in southern Galilee for centuries to venerate the place where Peter, James, and John witnessed the Transfiguration of Christ.

Overlooking a crater lake hidden within the hills southeast of Rome, the papal palace (and gardens and observatory) at Castel Gandolfo has provided popes a respite from Rome's summer heat.

It has been said that God writes straight with crooked lines. The origins of the Basilica of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows might provide an example of that kind of oblique writing.

Evelyn Waugh’s "Brideshead Revisited" presents an image of sloth, the vice of rejecting God's love and our spiritual inheritance.

The Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, standing in the location of the house of the beloved third-century virgin martyr, shows forth the vast centuries of Church history.

The precious stone of royalty and emperors in St. Peter's Basilica is found in two unexpected places: in the floor over which countless pilgrims walk and the base of the baptismal font.