New fees, rules discouraging visitors at St. Peter’s basilica?
April 07, 2025
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CWN Editor's Note: New rules and fees for visitors to St. Peter’s basilica may discourage tourists—and potential converts—write Elizabeth Lev.
To alleviate crowding during the Jubilee Year, and to add needed revenue for the Holy See’s overstrained budget, the Vatican has instituted new fees and rules for tourists visiting St. Peter’s basilica and the Vatican Museums. (Registered pilgrims, carrying the Jubilee pilgrim card, are exempt.) Lev, who has guided tours around the Vatican for 20 years, reports that the new system has caused long lines, overcrowding, and massive confusion.
Worse, Lev suggests, the system ignores the fact that some people who come to the Vatican as tourists will be inspired to become active believers. Rather than the following the spirit of the Jubilee, welcoming all to the Church, “the basilica’s arrangement has created two castes of visitors, the tourist and the pilgrim, under which system the tourist is seen more as a cash cow than a human in need of salvation.”
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