The Four Papal Basilicas of Rome

1. Which Four Churches They Are

The four papal basilicas of Rome are the Archbasilica of St John Lateran on the Caelian hill, St Peter's in the Vatican, St Paul Outside the Walls on the Via Ostiense, and the Basilica of St Mary Major on the Esquiline. Romans call them San Giovanni, San Pietro, San Paolo and Santa Maria Maggiore. Every other church on earth, including the great cathedrals of Europe and the vast shrines of the Americas and Asia, sits in a lower category.

The set is fixed and it is small. There is no fifth, no honorary addition, no church that has been promoted into it in modern times. A pilgrim who has stood in all four has stood in every major basilica there is, which is one reason the four-church circuit has been walked for six hundred years.

Two of the four are built over an apostle's grave, one is built around a bishop's chair, and one is built around a doctrine. That difference explains almost everything about how the four feel to walk into, and it explains why they cannot be ranked by size.

2. What the Word Basilica Ranks

Basilica began as an architectural word with no religious meaning at all. A Roman basilica was a long rectangular public hall with aisles and an apse, used for law courts and business, and when Christian worship became legal in the fourth century the Church took that plan rather than the plan of a pagan temple, because the temple was a house for a statue and the basilica was a hall for a crowd. The shape came with the name attached.

Over the centuries the word turned into a rank. Today the Church uses it in two grades, and confusing them is the most common mistake made about the four Roman churches.

Major Basilica

The rank of major basilica belongs to the four Roman churches and to no others. It carries concrete privileges rather than a decorative title. A papal altar stands in each, reserved to the pope or to a priest he permits. A cardinal archpriest governs each in his name. Each has a college of penitentiaries, priests with special faculties from the Apostolic Penitentiary, one of the tribunals of the Roman Curia, which is why confession in these four churches is available in a long list of languages. And each has a Holy Door, which is the privilege the four hold most visibly and which no minor basilica anywhere possesses.

Minor Basilica

Minor basilica is an honorary title granted by the Holy See to churches all over the world, usually for antiquity, for importance as a place of pilgrimage, or for standing in the liturgical life of a diocese. The title has been granted widely, and many countries have several. A minor basilica may use two signs of the title: the conopaeum, a half-open silk umbrella in the yellow and red of the papal colours, and the tintinnabulum, a small bell on a pole, both of them survivals of the equipment that once travelled with a pope on the road. Seeing an umbrella and a bell beside the sanctuary tells you the church holds the minor rank. It does not have a Holy Door and never has.

The distinction between major and minor basilicas, the privileges attached to each and the use of the conopaeum and tintinnabulum are set out in the norms on the title of minor basilica published by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in 1989.

Rome itself holds many minor basilicas, some of them older and stranger than the four majors. Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, San Clemente with its three stacked buildings, San Lorenzo Outside the Walls and Santa Maria in Trastevere are all minor basilicas, and the guide to planning a Catholic pilgrimage to Rome covers the wider city, the catacombs and the seven pilgrim churches. This page stays with the four that hold the higher rank.

3. From Patriarchal to Papal

Older books call these churches the patriarchal basilicas, and pilgrims who read those books arrive expecting a term that has since been retired. The change happened in living memory and it is worth understanding, because the old term encoded a piece of ecclesiology that Rome deliberately stopped asserting in that form.

The Old Scheme

Medieval Rome assigned its greatest churches to the ancient patriarchates of the Christian world, so that a pilgrim visiting them was symbolically visiting the whole Church. The Lateran belonged to the pope himself as patriarch of the West. St Peter's was assigned to Constantinople, St Paul Outside the Walls to Alexandria, St Mary Major to Antioch, and San Lorenzo Outside the Walls to Jerusalem. Each of the four majors kept a papal throne and an altar for the patriarch's use, and San Lorenzo carried the patriarchal name without ever holding the rank of major basilica.

The scheme was Roman symbolism rather than an arrangement agreed with the Eastern churches, and after the rupture of 1054 it described a communion that no longer existed on the ground. The break itself is treated in the guide to the Great Schism of 1054, and the Eastern churches that came out of it are set out in the guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Oriental Orthodox churches, which include the Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian and Syriac traditions, separated earlier and over a different question, and they are a distinct communion again.

The 2006 Change

The 2006 edition of the Annuario Pontificio dropped the term patriarchal basilica and listed the four Roman churches as papal basilicas instead. The same edition dropped the title Patriarch of the West from the list of papal titles, a decision explained at the time by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity as removing a term that had become historically obsolete and practically unusable, and as a gesture toward ecumenical dialogue rather than a change in doctrine about the papal office. San Lorenzo Outside the Walls kept its dignity as a great Roman church and remains a minor basilica.

The retitling of the four basilicas appears in the 2006 Annuario Pontificio, published by the Holy See. The explanation of the dropped title Patriarch of the West was issued by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in March 2006.

Nothing about the buildings changed. The papal altars, the Holy Doors and the archpriests are exactly what they were, and a Catholic who says patriarchal basilica in Rome will still be understood. What the pope claims over these four churches now has the plainer name: they are his.

4. Why St John Lateran Ranks First

St John Lateran ranks first because it is the cathedral of Rome. A cathedral is the church that holds a bishop's cathedra, his teaching chair, and the pope is Bishop of Rome before he is anything else. His chair is at the Lateran. The inscription cut across the facade states the claim without modesty: omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput, mother and head of all the churches of the city and of the world.

The confusion is understandable, because St Peter's is bigger, better known, and the place where papal ceremonies are televised from. The order of dignity runs on office rather than on scale or fame. The Lateran holds the chair, so the Lateran comes first, and the Holy See's own yearbook lists the four in that order.

The Building and Its History

Constantine gave the site to the Church in the early fourth century, on land that had belonged to the Laterani family and had held the barracks of the imperial horse guard, and the basilica raised there is the oldest of the four foundations. Nothing Constantine built survives to be seen. The church was wrecked by earthquake, sacked, burned twice in the fourteenth century and rebuilt each time. Francesco Borromini reworked the interior for the Holy Year of 1650, encasing the ancient nave columns in the great piers that carry the twelve niches, and Alessandro Galilei's tall east facade with its colossal statues was finished in 1735.

Its full dedication is to the Most Holy Saviour and to Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, which is why the books call it the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Saviour and Romans call it San Giovanni. Over the papal altar rises a Gothic ciborium of the 1360s, and the reliquary busts set high in it are traditionally said to hold the heads of Peter and Paul. Beside the church stands the octagonal Lateran Baptistery, whose plan shaped baptisteries across the Latin West for centuries, and behind it a thirteenth-century cloister of twisted mosaic columns by the Vassalletto family, which is among the quietest places in that part of Rome.

Why the Popes Left

The popes lived beside this church for roughly a thousand years. The Lateran Palace was the papal residence, five ecumenical councils were held here between 1123 and 1512, and the Vatican was a shrine across the river rather than a household. The departure to Avignon in 1309 left the Lateran to decay, and by the time the papacy returned the palace was ruined and the basilica had burned. The household settled at the Vatican and never moved back. The cathedral kept its rank and lost its resident.

The feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica falls on 9 November and is kept by the whole Latin Church, which is a striking thing: parishes in Manila and Lagos and Dublin keep the anniversary of a building in Rome, because that building is the cathedral of the bishop who holds the Petrine office. The office itself is set out in the guide to the papacy and what is claimed for it.

5. St Peter's in the Vatican

St Peter's is the second of the four and the one every visitor already knows. It stands over a grave on the Vatican hill that Roman Christians were honouring as the apostle Peter's by the middle of the second century, and its whole architecture is arranged to point down at that spot. Constantine's basilica went up over the shrine in the fourth century, Julius II ordered its replacement in 1505, and the present church took a hundred and twenty years and the hands of Bramante, Raphael, Antonio da Sangallo, Michelangelo, Maderno and Bernini before Urban VIII consecrated it on 18 November 1626.

The interior belongs to a guide of its own on this site. The colonnade, the Pieta, the baldachin and confessio, the dome, the Cathedra Petri, the bronze Peter with its worn foot and the grottoes with the papal tombs are all treated at length in the guide to St Peter's Basilica and what to see inside it, which also sets out what the excavations under the altar established and what they did not. What matters for the set of four is the rank and the reason for it.

Why It Is Not the Cathedral

St Peter's has no episcopal chair. Bernini's Cathedra Petri in the apse is a monument to the teaching office and a reliquary for an early medieval wooden chair, and the pope does not teach as Bishop of Rome from it. The basilica's standing rests on two other things: the grave beneath the altar, and its use as the church of the papal liturgy. Conclaves end with an announcement from its central balcony, canonisations happen on its steps, and the great feasts of the year are celebrated there.

Peter's death in Rome under Nero is attested early. Tacitus records that after the fire of 64 Nero put Christians to death as a public spectacle in his own gardens and at a circus show (Annals 15.44). He does not name the location, and later sources together with excavation place those gardens and that circus on the Vatican. Around the year 200 the Roman presbyter Gaius could offer to show an opponent the trophies of the apostles, Peter's on the Vatican and Paul's on the road to Ostia, in a passage preserved by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History (2.25.7). The commission the Church reads over that grave is older still.

The Latin of those verses runs in gold letters around the inside of Michelangelo's dome, directly above the altar and the grave, cut large enough to read from the pavement far below. For the fisherman himself, see the guide to Simon Peter and the keys.

6. St Paul Outside the Walls

St Paul Outside the Walls stands about two kilometres beyond the Aurelian walls on the Via Ostiense, over the grave venerated since antiquity as the apostle Paul's. Roman law kept burials outside the city, so both apostles lie outside the ancient boundary, and the walls were built long after the graves. Getting out there takes deliberate effort, which is part of what makes the visit read as a pilgrimage rather than a stop between two others.

Constantine raised a small church over the tomb, and the emperors Theodosius, Valentinian II and Arcadius replaced it at the end of the fourth century with a far larger basilica that stood for almost fifteen hundred years. That building survived, largely intact and full of medieval work, until the night of 15 July 1823, when a workman repairing the roof left a brazier burning and the basilica went up. The fire destroyed almost everything above the pavement. What stands now is a nineteenth-century reconstruction on the old plan, consecrated by Pius IX in 1854, and pilgrims often describe it as cold, which is a fair description of a Roman basilica rebuilt in the age of railways.

What Survived and What to Look For

Three things came through the fire. The fifth-century mosaic of the triumphal arch, put up under Galla Placidia, survived and was reset. The apse mosaic, made by Venetian craftsmen for Honorius III in the 1220s, survived with restoration, and shows Christ enthroned with a tiny kneeling pope at his feet. The thirteenth-century cloister, with its twisted and inlaid columns by the Vassalletto workshop, was untouched by the fire and survives complete.

Above the columns of the nave runs a frieze of medallion portraits of every pope from Peter onward, a series maintained and continued as each pontificate ends. Standing under it and following the line around the church makes the claim of apostolic succession visible in a way that few buildings manage, and the Roman habit of reading the empty medallions ahead as a question about the future is a piece of folklore rather than prophecy. This site sets no dates and treats none of that as prediction.

The Tomb

Beneath the papal altar, visible through an opening in the confessio, lies a stone sarcophagus with an inscription naming Paul, apostle and martyr. Benedict XVI announced in 2009, at the celebration closing the Pauline Year, that a probe inserted into the sealed sarcophagus had recovered fragments of linen, grains of incense and bone material that radiocarbon testing placed in the first or second century, which he described as confirming the unanimous and uncontested tradition that these are the mortal remains of the apostle Paul.

The result of the probe was announced by Pope Benedict XVI in his homily at First Vespers of the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, celebrated at the basilica on 28 June 2009 to close the Pauline Year, published by the Holy See. The dating is a radiocarbon result on material from a sealed sarcophagus and it does not by itself identify an individual.

The tomb of Paul and the Ostian Way are handled in more detail in the guide to Rome pilgrimage sites, and the man is treated in the guide to Paul of Tarsus. What the pilgrim standing at the grille should hold onto is the sentence Paul wrote from a Roman prison as his own execution approached.

7. St Mary Major

St Mary Major on the Esquiline hill is the great Marian basilica of the Latin Church and the only one of the four built around a doctrine rather than a grave or a chair. Sixtus III rebuilt it in the 430s, immediately after the Council of Ephesus in 431 defined that Mary may rightly be called Theotokos, God-bearer, because the one she bore is God. The church is that definition put into brick and mosaic, and it is among the oldest churches in the West dedicated to the Mother of God.

The mosaics of the 430s survive. Old Testament scenes run in panels along the top of the nave walls, above the columns, and the triumphal arch over the sanctuary carries the infancy of Christ. They are among the oldest narrative mosaic cycles in any Roman church, and they are worth binoculars. The coffered ceiling is Renaissance, the two great side chapels are late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and the brick campanile beside the apse is a landmark across the Esquiline.

The Icon and the Relic

The basilica holds the icon called Salus Populi Romani, Salvation of the Roman People, a much-venerated image of the Virgin and Child that Roman devotion has carried in procession in times of plague and war and that popes have prayed before for centuries. Beneath the high altar, in a reliquary of the nineteenth century, is wood venerated as fragments of the crib of Bethlehem, which gave the basilica its old name of Santa Maria ad Praesepem, St Mary at the Crib.

A tradition first written down centuries after the events it describes tells of a snowfall on the Esquiline in August that marked out the ground plan of the church for its founders. The basilica keeps the memory each year on 5 August, the feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Mary Major, and white petals are dropped from the ceiling during the liturgy. The Church presents this as a pious legend and has never made it a matter of belief.

Who Is Buried Here

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who shaped much of baroque Rome, is buried in this basilica under a plain slab near the sanctuary, without a monument. Several popes are buried here, and Pope Francis, who died on 21 April 2025, asked in his will to be buried at St Mary Major near the icon he visited before and after every journey, rather than in the Vatican. His grave there is deliberately plain and carries a single word.

Marian devotion at this basilica belongs to the ordinary public cult of the Church and involves no apparition claim of any kind. Sites where an apparition has been reported are governed by a different process, and the guide to Marian apparition sites and their status explains the 2024 norms the Church now uses to judge them. For the Virgin herself, see the guide to Mary, the Mother of God.

8. What All Four Have in Common

Four privileges make a major basilica, and all four run together. Knowing them turns the rank from a piece of trivia into something a visitor can actually see in the building.

A Papal Altar

Each of the four has an altar reserved to the pope, at which no one else celebrates without his permission. In practice the archpriest and a small number of others hold that permission, and the papal altar is the one under the canopy at the centre of the crossing, usually with a confessio or a sunken shrine in front of it. When you see a rail around a sunken well of lamps before an altar, you are looking at the mark of the rank.

A Cardinal Archpriest

Each basilica is governed by a cardinal appointed as archpriest, who runs it in the pope's name with a chapter of canons under him. The arrangement exists because these churches belong to the pope directly and stand outside the ordinary parish structure of the diocese, and it is the reason a major basilica can keep its own schedule of liturgies, its own choir and its own building office.

A College of Penitentiaries

Priests with special faculties from the Apostolic Penitentiary hear confessions in each of the four. The Penitentiary is the tribunal of the Roman Curia that deals with matters of conscience and with the remission of the gravest censures, and the confessors it appoints to the basilicas can absolve in cases an ordinary parish priest would have to refer. In practice what a pilgrim notices is the row of confessionals with a language posted above each box, and the fact that someone is almost always sitting in them. For what the sacrament actually does, see the guide to confession and how absolution works.

The practical effect is simple. An unhurried confession in your own language, in a church built over a martyr, is difficult to arrange in most parishes and straightforward to arrange in these four.

A Holy Door

Each of the four has a Holy Door, opened by the pope or by his delegate to begin a jubilee and walled up again when the year ends. No other church in the world has one as a permanent feature of the building, though a pope may designate a door elsewhere for a particular Holy Year. Section 9 takes each of the four in turn.

Extraterritorial Status

Three of the four stand in Italian territory and belong to the Holy See. The Lateran Treaty of 1929, which settled the Roman Question and created Vatican City State, granted extraterritorial status to a list of properties outside the city walls, including St John Lateran with its palace, St Mary Major and St Paul Outside the Walls. Italian police do not enter them without invitation, and the buildings are exempt from expropriation and taxation. St Peter's needs no such provision, since it stands inside Vatican City itself.

The extraterritorial status of the three basilicas outside Vatican City is established by the Lateran Treaty concluded between the Holy See and Italy on 11 February 1929 and by its annexes.

9. The Four Holy Doors and Where They Are

There are four Holy Doors in Rome, one in each papal basilica, and in each case it is the rightmost door of the main entrance front as you face the church. Outside a jubilee all four are shut and blocked with masonry on the inside, so what a visitor sees is a bronze door that does not open. Most people walk past all four without noticing, because a sealed door in a wall of doors announces nothing about itself.

The Doors Themselves

The Holy Door of St Peter's is the best known of the four. Its sixteen bronze panels, cast by the Sienese sculptor Vico Consorti and installed for the Holy Year of 1950, run from the fall of Adam and Eve through the whole history of sin and forgiveness to the Church's absolution, and they reward five minutes of looking even when the door is sealed, which is how most visitors will find it. The doors of the other three basilicas are twentieth and twenty-first century bronzes commissioned for the Great Jubilee of 2000: Floriano Bodini's at the Lateran, Enrico Manfrini's at St Paul Outside the Walls, and a Marian door by Luigi Mattei at St Mary Major installed in the years around that jubilee.

Vico Consorti's authorship of the Holy Door of St Peter's and its installation for the Holy Year of 1950 are recorded by the Fabbrica di San Pietro, the papal office responsible for the basilica. The doors of the other three basilicas were commissioned in connection with the Great Jubilee of 2000.

The Rite of Opening

For centuries the pope began a Holy Year by striking the walled-up door three times with a silver hammer, after which workmen removed the masonry. The rite was set aside in the later twentieth century, partly for safety after falling masonry made the ceremony hazardous, and the pope now pushes the door open from outside after the wall behind it has been dismantled in advance. At the close of the year the door is shut and bricked up again, and a casket containing the key and a record of the jubilee is traditionally sealed into the wall behind it.

For the jubilee of 2025 Pope Francis added something without precedent. On 26 December 2024 he opened a Holy Door in the chapel of Rebibbia prison in Rome, the first Holy Door ever opened in a prison, so that men who could not travel to a basilica could pass through one where they were. The four basilica doors were closed at the end of the year, the three outside the Vatican on 28 December 2025 and St Peter's on 6 January 2026.

10. What Passing Through a Holy Door Does

Passing through a Holy Door during a jubilee is one of the works to which the Church attaches a plenary indulgence, granted under the ordinary conditions. Those conditions are fixed and short: sacramental confession, Holy Communion, prayer for the intentions of the pope, and freedom from attachment to sin, including venial sin. The last condition is the one that does the real work, and it is the reason a careful Catholic speaks of trying for a plenary indulgence rather than of collecting one.

The image the doors depend on is a sentence of Christ about himself, and the liturgy of opening quotes it.

What an Indulgence Is

An indulgence remits the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven. The guilt is dealt with in confession. What remains is the disorder that sin leaves in a person and the debt of purification that goes with it, and an indulgence draws on the merits of Christ and the saints to remit that. The Church makes no claim that an indulgence forgives sin, none that it applies to sins not yet committed, and none that it can be bought. The traffic in indulgences that helped trigger the Reformation was an abuse of the doctrine, condemned by the Council of Trent, which forbade all charges attached to indulgences. The guides to purgatory and what happens after death and to the sacrament of confession set out the framework.

What It Does Not Do

Walking through a Holy Door is a prayer with a threshold in it. It does not make anyone safe, it settles nothing about anyone's standing before God, and it is not required of any Catholic. Nobody is obliged to travel to Rome, and a person who never leaves their own parish is at no disadvantage in the Christian life. The pope's own act of opening a door inside a prison in 2024 was a statement about exactly that.

The wider theology of jubilee years, the bull of indiction for 2025 and the conditions the Apostolic Penitentiary set for that Holy Year are covered in the guide to the Jubilee of 2025 and the Pilgrims of Hope. This page stays with the buildings and the doors.

11. How the Four-Basilica Pilgrimage Began

The custom of visiting all four grew out of the first jubilees, and it grew by addition. Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Holy Year in 1300 and attached its indulgence to visits over a set number of days to the basilicas of the apostles, St Peter's and St Paul Outside the Walls. Rome was overwhelmed. Contemporary accounts describe crowds that had to be routed one way across the bridge at Castel Sant'Angelo, and Dante, who seems to have been there, uses that traffic management as a simile in the Inferno.

The Lateran was added for the jubilee of 1350, and St Mary Major for the jubilee of 1390. From then on the four together made the circuit, and the phrase visiting the four basilicas became shorthand for making the Roman pilgrimage properly.

The Seven Churches

In the sixteenth century Philip Neri built a longer route on top of the four. His walk added three more churches to the set, took a full day on foot with picnics and singing along the way, and turned the Roman pilgrimage into something cheerful at a time when Roman piety badly needed cheering. The seven-church walk is treated in the guide to Rome pilgrimage sites, which sets out the full route. The four remain the core of it.

The Word Pilgrimage

A pilgrimage is a journey made for God, and the Church has never taught that the walking is what saves. The point of a pilgrimage is attention: a person who has knelt at the confessio of St Peter's reads Matthew 16 differently for the rest of their life, and a person who has stood at Paul's sarcophagus reads Second Timothy differently. That is a real gain and it can be described honestly without inflating it. The guide to what a pilgrimage actually is works through the theology, and the guide to making a virtual pilgrimage from home covers the forms that do not involve travel, without pretending a screen is a journey.

12. Walking the Four as One Pilgrimage

The four basilicas are spread across Rome and two of them are a long way out, so the circuit is a matter of geography before it is a matter of devotion. Nothing below depends on timetables, ticketing or fares, all of which change and none of which should be taken from a page written in advance.

How They Sit on the Map

St Peter's is on the west bank of the Tiber, in the Vatican. St Mary Major is high on the Esquiline near Termini station, roughly in the middle of the modern city. St John Lateran is southeast of the Colosseum, about a kilometre from St Mary Major along a straight and ancient road, which is the one pair of the four that make an easy walk together. St Paul Outside the Walls is well to the south, beyond the walls on the Ostiense road, and it is genuinely out of town rather than a short detour.

An Order That Works

Take the Lateran first if you can, because it sets the logic of the city, and walk from there along the Via Merulana to St Mary Major, which is the historic route between the two and takes about twenty minutes on foot. Give St Peter's its own half-day at least, since it swallows time and the dome climb will finish your legs. Pair St Paul Outside the Walls with something else in the south rather than sandwiching it between two central churches. Two of the four in one day is comfortable, three is possible, four in a day turns basilicas into corridors.

Three Things That Do Not Change

Shoulders and knees are covered inside all four, for everyone, and people are turned away at the door for shorts and vests through every Roman summer. A scarf in a bag solves it. Confession is available in many languages in all four, and it is worth doing early in the visit rather than on the last morning. And each basilica keeps its own rhythm of opening, closing and liturgy, posted at the church and published by the church itself, so check the one you want on the day you want it.

Mass at all four is the older and better version of the circuit. Going to Mass at the tomb of an apostle is the thing Rome offers that few other cities can, and no money changes hands. The structure of the liturgy is the same in every one of them, and the guide to the Mass and its parts lays it out if the language is a barrier.

If You Are Not Going

Most people reading this will never stand in all four. That is the ordinary case rather than a deprivation. The graces the Church attaches to confession, Communion and prayer for the pope are available in any parish on any weekday, and the guides to Catholic pilgrimage sites around the world and to pilgrimage sites in Italy cover places a great deal closer to most readers than the Via Ostiense.

13. Papal Basilicas Outside Rome

A small number of churches outside Rome carry the title papal basilica, which means they are subject directly to the pope rather than to the local bishop and are governed for him by a papal legate or delegate. The Basilica of St Francis at Assisi, built over the grave of the saint, and Santa Maria degli Angeli in the plain below Assisi, which encloses the little chapel of the Portiuncula where Francis lived and died, are the best known of them.

These are papal basilicas without being major basilicas. The rank of major basilica, with its Holy Door, belongs to the four Roman churches alone, and no church at Assisi has a Holy Door. The distinction matters because guidebooks routinely blur it and leave readers expecting a fifth or sixth door somewhere in Umbria. For the saint buried under the Assisi basilica, see the guide to St Francis of Assisi, and for other Italian shrines, the guide to pilgrimage sites in Italy.

The papal status of the Assisi basilicas is a matter of their direct dependence on the Holy See, recorded in the Annuario Pontificio, and it is distinct from the rank of major basilica.

Everywhere else, the highest rank a church can hold is minor basilica. The cathedrals of every diocese on earth outside Rome, and the great national shrines of Latin America, Africa and Asia, all sit in that category or below it, however large or famous they are. Nothing about the honour a local church deserves depends on the label, and a village church where the Eucharist is reserved holds what the four Roman basilicas hold. The guide to the Eucharist and the Real Presence is the one to read if that sentence sounds like a consolation prize.

14. What People Get Wrong About the Four

Five errors account for most of the confusion about the papal basilicas, and each of them has a short correction.

That St Peter's Is the Cathedral of Rome

The cathedral of Rome is St John Lateran, which holds the pope's episcopal chair. St Peter's is the church of the papal liturgy and the place where the apostle is buried, and it has no cathedra of that kind. The mistake is a common one, and people who have been to Rome make it as readily as people who have not.

That the Four Are Ranked by Size

Rank follows office and history. St Peter's is by a wide margin the largest of the four, and it ranks second. St Mary Major is the smallest of the four, and it holds the same rank of major basilica as the others. Size is a fact about the building rather than a fact about its standing.

That Any Big Church Is a Basilica

Basilica is a granted title with a defined content. A large church with no title is a church, an honoured church may be a minor basilica, and a major basilica is one of four. Many enormous modern shrines are minor basilicas, and many small ancient Roman churches are too.

That the Holy Doors Are Always Open

All four are sealed outside a jubilee year, and an ordinary jubilee comes once in twenty-five years. Pilgrims arrive expecting the Holy Door to be the way in and find masonry. There is nothing to walk through between jubilees, and nothing in a Roman pilgrimage depends on the doors.

That Visiting Them Does Something on Its Own

Travel forgives no sin. Confession forgives sin, the Eucharist feeds, and prayer is prayer whether it happens on the Via Ostiense or in a kitchen at home. What a journey to the four adds is attention and memory, and those are worth the fare without being inflated into something else.

15. Frequently Asked Questions