To the heart of the Catholic universe.

As a pre-Christmas gift to mark my 21st year as a Roman Catholic, my 'coming of age' in the faith, I finally undertook my first ever pilgrimage to Italy, Rome, and the Vatican this fall. It was an overwhelming, sense-flooding, soul-affirming experience that I expect I will be absorbing for the rest of my life.

To live for a week in a land where the Christian faith constitutes the very bedrock of civilisation (not that everyone ascribes to it, mind you) was a novelty to say the least. Sure, there are Italian Jews, Muslims and agnostics in evidence, all free to go about their lives in an unencumbered way. But their presence does not force Christians into dim and quiet corners to practise their faith as if it were something shameful or bizarre that they dare not reveal to others.

In fact, for this mild-mannered Canadian convert to Catholicism, there were times when I cringed a little at some of the excesses on display. Between day trips to Rome, Loretto, Ancona and Pescara, I returned to my lodgings each night in the medieval quarter of Ascoli Piceno. The patron saint of this ancient town of 50,000 (with 52 functioning Catholic churches) is the German born Saint Emidio who was martyred in 303 A.D. by beheading. According to legend, Emidio, determined to be buried in consecrated ground, picked up his severed head and walked with it to the nearest Christian graveyard. I don't know if recyclers currently have a patron saint, but if they're looking for one, Emidio could well be their guy.

Emidio's remains now rest in the crypt beneath Ascoli Piceno's main cathedral. The many tapestries and paintings celebrating the saint invariably show him carrying the head before him like some oddly shaped soup tureen, with the face turned upward, eyes gazing toward heaven instead of on the path before him. There's a kind of kitschy grotesqueness to some aspects of the Emidio cult that frankly makes me squirm. But there are other aspects that strike me as entirely commendable. Every weekday afternoon, for instance, a group of the faithful gathers just above Emidio's crypt to recite the Rosary, sending up an ardent, keening call and response of prayer that is absolutely haunting in its articulation of sorrow and remorse.

Though situated just across the Tiber from the ancient heart of Rome (and attracting no small part of the tourist trade to both Italy and Rome) Vatican City is not only the seat of government for the Roman Catholic Church but also functions as the world's smallest independent state. With a permanent population of about 1,000, the Vatican publishes its own newspaper available in all the major languages of the world (L'Osservatore Romano), runs its own radio network and even has it own postal and police systems.

I was half a year late to catch even a window-side glimpse of the pontiff who so wisely and dynamically presided over the church for all of the years of my membership and three more before that. A giant among popes, John Paul II seems already to have earned that title posterity has lastingly bestowed upon only a handful of the successors of St. Peter throughout the last 2000 years--'the Great'.

But in so many ways, it's as if he never left. The imprint of John Paul remains everywhere you look in decorative banners and pictures strung up here and there and in the myriad souvenirs and books for sale in the shops and stalls inside and just outside of the Vatican. He also remains in a far more profound sense than these, a sense which was elucidated nearly ten years ago by his successor, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

"The Church lives not only synchronically," Ratzinger wrote in Salt of the Earth." The Church at end of the Millennium, "but diachronically as well. This means that it is always all--even the dead--who live and are the whole Church, that it is always all who must be considered in any majority in the Church."

So comprehensive are its collections of paintings, sculptures, vases, tapestries, maps, frescoes and papyri that you could easily spend a year touring through just the Vatican Museums and still not take it all in. Not that you'll ever get the place to yourself; even on a weekday in late October you will be part of a milling swarm of people who move through one treasure-clogged hall and museum after another. Everyone knows about Michelangelo's celebrated murals on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Also on display are works by Raphael, Fra Angelico, Melozzo da Forli, Titian, and, from more modern times, Vincent Van Gogh, Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland.

What you see in such a tour of the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica and Square are glimpses of a church of pro-found power and sophistication which also speaks to the simplest heart. Through two millennia, the world has not known a greater patron of all the arts, a more dynamic engine of learning, or so wise a compiler and archivist of the history of mankind. If, as Benedict says, there is a place in this church for both the living and the dead, small wonder that there should also be a place here for the most erudite scholar and the most accomplished artist as well as the most credulous peasant. 'Catholic,' of course, is not only the name of the world's largest Christian denomination. It is also a word that means 'universal' and the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica are the living heart of that universe.

Herman Goodden is a full-time journalist. He writes from London Ontario.