EP 01 - The Real-Life Magisterium

Whatever happened to Saint Peter?

- Episode 01 -

The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

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Whatever happened to Saint Peter?

15 October 2025

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The real life magisterium: the secret history of the ROMAN Catholic Church

Statue of Saint Peter (with the keys to heaven) and the 4000 priests assembled for the funeral of Pope Francis (no woman in sight)

Does it matter what happened to Saint Peter?

So the story is that Peter was chosen by Jesus as the foundation of the church, and was then the first bishop of Rome, and that he consecrated the second, who ordained the third and so on and on until Pope Leo today.

And this is what gives the Pope his authority as head of the church. As the church’s own legal code says [Canon 331], ‘the Pope … succeeds St. Peter as the head of the Catholic Church. He has supreme, full, immediate, and universal authority over the Church.’

Since this out-of-date monarchy is responsible for human rights amongst its 1.3billion members, and uses its observer status at the UN to lobby and vote for ‘Catholic teaching’, this claim that Jesus gave the Church its supreme power is an important one to investigate.

And we can do this now because over the last couple of generations modern historians have begun to examine the Roman Empire. We are now seeing this period in completely new ways.

Early representation of Jesus as the good shepherd, Crypt of Lucina, Rome

Was Peter as important to the early Church as he is today?

The earliest history of the Catholic Church is an extraordinary story – one that has taken us by surprise every time we turn a page. But let’s start with Saint Peter.

Historian Michael Goulder sifts through the most contemporary evidence that exists for Peter’s movements after Jesus’s crucifixion. He starts with the book of The Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament which the Church considers authoritative. Halfway through the book, Peter just vanishes. The Catholic church draws a veil over this awkward fact too. Nobody ever reads from the second half of the Acts of the Apostles during Sunday services.

Goulder concludes ‘Peter disappears after AD54: he probably died in his bed about 55. The likelihood of his having visited Rome is remote.’

Which tells us that the popes' claims to authority have no historical basis. If popes want respect, they will have to earn it.

Acts of the Apostles (the story of what happened after Jesus's crucifixion) dates from before the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in AD70. It is the earliest record we have and in it Peter simply disappears after AD55.

Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel to elect the successor to Pope Francis, 7 May 2025

Not meant to be upsetting to Catholics

Some of our best friends are Catholics. We attend a Catholic church. We go because we appreciate the worshipping community there.

But for too long Catholics, who are thoughtful in every other area of their lives, appear to have stopped asking questions about what the Church tells them about its traditions.

It’s a mental habit some cynically refer to as ‘pray, pay and obey’ – and it’s something the Catholic church has historically been noticeably anxious to encourage.

If you think Dan Brown’s Priory of Sion is secretive, or Philip Pullman’s Magisterium, then ask anyone who has tangled with the echelons of the Vatican - we have - and we can tell you they never reply, never explain.

#113 Whatever happened to Saint Peter? - Ep 1 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

Excavating under St Peter's basilica, posed for LIFE magazine, 1950s

Not thrown to lions and burned as torches to games

For almost two thousand years the Church could not confirm the burial place of Peter, the first bishop of Rome. They say this was because when Peter died Christians were being persecuted and had to hide in the catacombs and so his grave could not be marked.

Well, historian Brent Shaw reckons in fact there is no reliable evidence of persecution of Christians in Rome until the AD250s. He says that before AD100 there were so few Christians the Romans didn’t distinguish them from Jews. (Later in the series we look into the 17^th Century rediscoveries of the catacombs around Rome by a Maltese archaeologist called Antonio Bosio.)

In this episode however, we go underground beneath the great St Peter's basilica, to examine the myth that Peter is buried there, and to take a look at how the excavations to find his tomb were conducted from the 1940s.

The story involves Mussolini, and also a German priest who, as leader of the German Centre Party, made a speech at the Reichstag that fateful day when Hitler was given the full powers of a dictator. Curious and curiouser.

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