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Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.

At the end of last month, I was in Rome while the wretched synodon synodality was busy collapsing,

and a massive sex scandal involving Father Marco Routnik finally came to a head, despite the attempts of various Catholic journalists to suppress the truth.

And don't worry, I'm not going to talk any more about it.

You can check out previous episodes of Holy Smoke for the horrifying background. Let me just say

that what happened while I was there would be enough to bring down any secular head of state.

Instead, I'm going to talk about something different. The day after all this hoo-ha, I went to the Little Church of St. Cosmos and Damien, who were brothers, doctors and martyrs in the early church. And obviously I'm named after one of them, which is really an extraordinary place, often overlooked by tourists, because it's small and not very exciting looking from the outside, but in fact

highly unusual in that it incorporates part of a pagan temple and one of the very earliest Christian

basilicas. And the difference between the gloom of the temple and the light of the basilica was

explained to me brilliantly by one of the world's leading Christian art historians,

the great Liz Lev, who's been a guest on this podcast before. I found it a very inspiring

conversation, particularly given the context of these awful developments in the Vatican.

And I hope you enjoy it, despite the fact that I had to record it

in the middle of a little church which was swirling with tour guides and visitors. And yes,

there's background noise, but you can certainly hear the unspeakable, wonderful erudite voice

of Liz Lev. Here we are in the Church of St Cosmos and Damien, which I understand is the first church,

two who have been built in the Roman Forum, with continuous masses here since when?

Since 525.

When the church was first constructed, it's a basilica that is built inside two ancient Roman buildings, which is what makes us such a fascinating space because both of these buildings started out their existence in the service of pagan Rome.

So the actual church where we're sitting in right now was originally a basilica, meaning meeting hall, built by Emperor Vespasian in 100 AD or 70 or 80 AD.

And as a matter of fact, outside we can see the big blocks from the first century.

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